Increased ‘seriousness and relatability’ promised
By The Amazing Joel MacKenzie-Man, Chief Rehashed Garbage Correspondent
The revamping of comic book-inspired movies is not new, as The Incredible Hulk, Superman, Batman, and, just recently, Spider-Man have all had movie series created and re-created. But movie studios are currently looking at revamping revamps, one of which will be a new Spider-Man franchise to be released in two years.
This announcement follows hardly a month after the release of the first movie in the current Spider-Man revamp, The Amazing Spider-Man.
“With The Amazing Spider-Man, we really wanted a serious, real-looking, special effect-laden film,” reads an online post from John Gorgas, head of PR at Columbia Pictures. The film accomplished just that, he says, greatly surpassing those elements in the original Spider-Man movie series (2002–2007).
The post continues, “We’re especially excited about the current progress of special effects.” He mentions a CGI chair that will appear in the film with no discernable difference from other, real chairs around it. “We’ve reached that point.”
His online announcement cites increasing viewer interest in “general seriousness” and North Americans’ “general impatience,” and promises a new Spider-Man movie to be released late 2014. This time around, viewers will see another reinterpretation of the humble beginnings of Spider-Man, this time in elementary school. The film will focus on Peter Parker’s adventures in the first grade, and will deal with, according to Gorgas, “just really serious” events in the character’s life, including, “the death of his parents, his relationship with regular spiders, the origin of his trademark glasses, and probably the deaths of some other people.” When pressed for further details, he refused to elaborate: “You’ll just have to wait, and pay, and see.”
[quote style=”boxed”]Columbia’s PR mentioned a CGI chair that will appear in the film with no discernable difference from other, real chairs around it. ‘We’ve reached that point.[/quote]
Other series lined up to be made more serious and more special effect-laden include Superman, The Fantastic Four, Watchmen (which is to be split into three instalments and add new background stories to every main character and several very small characters, and which promises to increase Alan Moore’s reclusion), and probably Batman.
A new Superman series revamp is scheduled for five years after the release of this current Superman revamp, to include a main actor who is expected to be born sometime early in August. “I think he’s coming sooner, though,” predicts Emma Kimberland, mother of the unborn actor. “The last two were early,” she says, referring to two of her four other children, all of whom have starred in made-for-television films and have never gone to school.
New adjectives placed in the tentative titles in front of main characters’ names, released by Columbia and Warner Bros., hint at possible themes in the upcoming films. Some adjectives include “Spectacular,” “Really Spectacular,” “Hardened,” “Awesome,” “Retired,” “Still,” “Exotic,” and “Subsequent.”
During a phone interview, when asked if special effects and increasingly serious situations could replace clever writing and talented, hard-working actors, Gorgas offered “free tickets to the next Green Lantern revamp for the first person who accurately predicts the film’s main enemy.” He also hinted that the enemy would probably be a revamp of an enemy from a previous superhero film, “with a more serious twist.”
