BW Media Spotlight

While looking for article topics and Saturday article links, this article on Bleeding Fool caught my attention not from the story itself but one of the comments. Weird things get my brain working sometimes. The article itself is Dakota Johnson blaming committee meddling for the failings of the Madame Web movie because apparently the only good committee in movies was Marvel’s committee charged with keeping the adaptations accurate…and that’s the one Disney fired. She didn’t take the usual approach of blaming the fans for not getting it or being sexist against women as superheroes or the usual comments you hear from actors and actresses when these movies bomb.

The strange thing, the comment that got my mind going is a statement we’ve all heard from critics and even I’ve made. Maybe it was the wording: “Blame whoever said a Spiderverse movie series without Spiderman was a good idea.” Missing hyphen aside, it’s not like that comment hasn’t been made many times by many people, myself included, but for some reason that sentence on that day got me thinking…could a Spiderverse movie without the titular Spider work? Could you use the extended Spider-Man cast and rogues gallery without Spider-Man? I mean, The Penguin has been very well received, and it’s Oswald Cobblepot without Batman. I think someone said he’s only mentioned once and never truly shows up. I don’t have HBO Max (glad they went back to that name) and it’s tied to the Matt Reeves version of Batman I’m not interested in, but you see my point, right?

So why does that succeed and movies following Spider-Man’s extended cast from Sony turn out so bad? The movies ranging from mediocre to hot LA trash probably doesn’t help, and then being bad adaptations on top of it makes it impossible to save on any level. Is that the problem? Were the movies just bad? Could Sony have done something good instead of the movies we got? Maybe there is a way to do a movie with Spider-characters even if Peter or possibly Miles never show up?

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