Spider-man Month: TV-Retrospective: Ultimate Spider-man

And so we come to my final entry for Spider-man month

When Disney reacquired the animated rights for Spider-man from Sony, it lead to Spider-man appearing in The Avengers: Earth’s mightiest heroes. It also lead to the cancellation of The Spectacular Spider-man, to be replaced by a more in-house production.

“Based” on Marvel comics Ultimate Imprint (despite the fact that Peter Parker had long been replaced by Miles Morales in that imprint) Ultimate Spider-man was the result. It’s been the subject of infamy amongst fans. Some appraising it’s new direction and the focus of it integrating it into the Marvel Universe, others thinking it sucks. What do I think? I’ll get to that later.

Bear in mind, I have not gone over all the episodes of the series for the purposes of this review, I am doing this purely off memory (and limited research) so there may be a few inaccuracies and of course spoilers will follow

Guilty Pleasures #13 - Spider-man Month: The Amazing Spider-man 2

It’s the penultimate review of Spider-man Month!!

And yes, this is my favourite Spider-man movie. It’s also the only one I’ve seen at the cinema. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t got its problems, but I’ll get to that.

The Amazing Spider-man had a decent box office performance, making give or take $500million, and this one made about the same (I know it's the lowest grossing of the films, but it's not by much)… So why is this one judged a failure again? People expected it to break $1bn, why? None of the other Spider-man movies managed that. Iron Man 3 did it? Well, yeah and you wanna know why? Because it was that followed the f*cking Avengers! Iron Mans 1 and 2 didn’t get close. Because the 2^nd and 3^rd Nolan Batman movies did it? (The first one didn’t get close) here’s some advice Sony. SPIDER-MAN ISN’T BATMAN! Batman is the most popular super-hero, Spider-man is at best the 3^rd most popular Superhero, with Superman second. (OK, that might be a personal thing, but…) Speaking of our big boy Blue, remind me how Man of Steel did in the Box office.

Oh yeah, it did worse than this film. Seriously, DC is using Man of Steel to launch a DC Franchise, Amazing Spider-man 2… Might spawn a Sinister 6 movie. I suppose the issue is merchandise. Whilst DC, and its parent company Time Warner own all the  rights to their characters, Sony does not own the toy rights to Spider-man. Disney owns them, and gets most of the profits from movie related toys, and other merchandise. So really, the movie is Sony’s bread and butter. But $500 million, most of your movies don’t make that kind of money

OK, rant over… It just bugs me every time people say this movie was a commercial failure. It really wasn’t. But clearly it was enough to drive Sony into making a deal with Marvel to pair Spider-man into the MCU.

The Amazing Spider-man 2 was Mark Webb’s attempt to make a movie that stands on its own, whilst also giving opportunities for sequels and spin-offs. You’ll quickly see he succeeds in one of those but whether he succeeds in the other is questionable. So let’s dig into the Fairly Decent Spider-man 2 (well, that’s the more accurate title) and see what we’ve got here.

Arrow season 3 episodes 15-17 review

It's been quite a while since we last dived into the world of Arrow, but then the series took a break and I didn't have much to tell, but we're back with the episode that lead into the break, and the two episodes that followed it. Let's check them out

Spider-man Month - Mini-review: The Amazing Spider-man

It's still Spider-man Month!

By now, you probably know what my opinion is of the Raimi movies, namely that they all suck. Not to say that there weren’t some good things. Spider-man doesn’t blame himself for everything that goes wrong in the world (like he seems to in the comics, according to Linkara) some of the villains were decent, I actually like the Green Goblin, and erm… erm… yeah, that’s about it for the compliments, I have very little else to applaud.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not the poor reception of Spider-man 3 that lead to the reboot, well, not exactly. Raimi was working on a Spider-man 4, with Maguire set to resume his role as Peter Parker and Spider-man, hell: they had plans to make Spider-man’s 5 and 6 concurrently, if Spider-man 4 was enough of a success. (Having said that, the idea of taking Felicia Hardy, a character who has an alter-ego as the Black Cat in the comics, and turning her into a female knock-off of the Vulture does not impress me, in fact, with rumours of the Lizard, and the real Vulture also making an appearance, means it may well have gone down the same route as Spider-man 3 in terms of overstuffed villains)

However, creative problems and Raimi’s inability to get his wanted budget or time frame lead to him leaving the franchise entirely. Sony decided to the reboot the franchise with new director Mark Webb (yes, we all know that joke, don’t say it)

So we have this reboot origin story, the Amazing Spider-man. Which it’s time to look into

The Flash episodes 14-15 review - The Fallout/Out of Time

Yup, it’s now March, and I’m only reviewing the 2 episodes that have aired since the last review, because let’s be honest, the show had to take a break at some point.

Gotham episode 18 review - Everyone has a Cobblepot

I was considering postponing this review, however, I like to keep my promises and I said that in the event of a hiatus, I'd post the review at the scheduled time anyway.

Spider-man Month - TV Retrospective: The Spectacular Spider-man

It's still Spider-man Month

Watching those 3 movies made me want to make a deal with Mephisto. They were all god-awful. And no-one is going to change my mind on that. I’ll get onto the Amazing (the title, I’m not saying they’re amazing) movies next week, suffice to say I find them a lot more enjoyable, even if they are flawed.

But that’s next week. This week we look at Greg Weisman and Victor Cook’s attempt to bring life into the wall-crawler. Bear in mind, for the purposes of the review, I have not been able to watch all the episodes. I’m doing most of this off memory, so there may be a few inaccuracies. Obviously spoilers will be discussed.