How Spider-Man 3 was derailed by Venom and studio interference
Back in UK cinemas this week, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 is more successful as a trilogy-topping character drama than the blockbuster event that Sony and Columbia Pictures wanted it to be.
The oft-maligned third film certainly isn’t a patch on the two previous Raimi movies, which both returned to the UK box office top 10 in recent weeks, but it’s in the same style. Spider-Man 3 resumes the light, sincere and operatic tone of the first two films, but becomes corrupted by the dark and enduring influence of studio-mandated fan service.
We rejoin Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) in an unusually sunny spell, balancing his responsibilities as Spider-Man with his work, studies, and plans to propose to Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). Like the film itself, this is quickly muddled by his unresolved tension with Harry Osborn (James Franco), the emergence of escaped con Flint Marko as the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), and the wholly unexpected arrival of Venom, an alien symbiote that latches onto Spidey.
Sony greenlit and dated the third instalment for May 2007 before 2004’s Spider-Man 2 even came out. To give you an idea of how big a cross-branding event Spider-Man 3 was for Sony, the company’s PlayStation 3 console launched in late 2006 with the same logo font as the movie. On home media, it was bundled with the PS3 to promote the console’s in-built Blu-ray player. The marketing and promotional tie-ins went on for a whole year spanning before and after the cinema release.
And so, Raimi and his brother Ivan started work on the next story right after the second film’s release. Sticking with the trilogy’s themes of power and responsibility, their focus was on Peter’s vigilantism and morality, and the importance of forgiveness.
At the time of the film’s release, Raimi told Superhero Hype: "[Peter] considers himself a hero and a sinless person versus these villains that he nabs. We felt it would be a great thing for him to learn a little less black and white view of life and that he's not above these people."
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During development, producers Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin encouraged Raimi to bulk out the supporting cast with existing characters from the comics. For instance, the story already had another woman who would come between Peter and MJ, and Ziskin suggested introducing Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard). Raimi used this note to flesh out a police officer character, who became Captain Stacy (James Cromwell).
More notably, Arad insisted that Spider-Man fans really wanted to see Venom in a movie. Although Raimi didn’t like the character due to his lack of humanity, he wanted to add an extra villain to contrast with Sandman’s personal problems and Harry’s eventual return to Peter’s side, so Venom was added to the mix.
The main bone of contention for Venom fans is that the character isn’t dark or cool enough, which bumps against the Silver Age stylings of these Spider-Man movies. This trilogy recalls the Superman movies of the 1970s and 1980s more than they foreshadow the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Coincidentally, Arad’s intervention means they continue to take after those movies — the hero’s origin in the first movie, losing his powers in the second, and bringing out his darker side in the third.
Like Superman III, Raimi’s film doesn’t think it’s a good thing for the hero to turn bad. Christopher Reeve’s Superman stopped shaving and blew out the Olympic flame so that Maguire’s Peter can wear emo bangs and strut down the street to James Brown’s People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul. And we’ve all seen those 'Bully Maguire' memes.
Likewise, Raimi reinvents Venom’s eventual host Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) as a mirror of Peter, competing with him at work and also being interested in Gwen. Lacking our hero’s sense of morality, he comes into great power without accepting great responsibility.
Adding characters like Eddie, Gwen, and Venom overbalance a movie that’s got quite enough drama to be getting on with, and the first hour of the movie pinballs between umpteen characters. Nevertheless, it retains the basic shape and arc that Raimi set out to explore, up-ending Peter’s happiness with unresolved grudges and power dynamics until he learns to fix himself.
Maguire, Dunst, and Franco all know the score and they all trust Raimi enough to take wilder swings. Franco comes off sillier as the bloated structure parks Harry in an amnesia subplot straight out of soap opera. Conversely, Dunst gets much more to do, as MJ is stung by rejection at work, then in her love life, until she bristles at getting abducted in every film and chucks a cinder block at Venom at a pivotal moment. (This is more a weakness in the first two films than a strength in this one.)
And inevitably, Sandman feels most bedded in. He was there from the off, and filming started in November 2005 to give Sony Pictures Imageworks a head-start on the sandy digital effects. While the scene in which Marko is reborn from a particle accelerator accident is still the most impressive, it’s well matched with practical effects and Haden Church’s sorrowful performance.
Both of the moments mentioned in our recent columns on the first two films are also revisited: the upside-down kiss and the relationship between Peter and his neighbours. These aren’t crowd-pleasing nods to popular movies past, but essential to the story Raimi’s telling.
As tales of studio interference go, they hardly come more symbolic than both a character and a movie being warped by the addition of an alien character that supposedly boosts its power.
In a 2014 interview with The Nerdist, Raimi copped to not liking Venom, saying: "I tried to make it work, but I didn’t really believe in all the characters, so that couldn’t be hidden from people who loved Spider-Man. If the director doesn’t love something, it’s wrong of them to make it when so many other people love it."
Ultimately, Spider-Man 3 was the box-office hit that Sony wanted, but it had mixed reviews and a major backlash from the very fans Arad was courting. The fourth film stalled in development and the franchise was rebooted in 2012. Ironically, the Venom trilogy, starring Tom Hardy, has turned out funnier and campier than anything Raimi did.
Shambolic as it is, the film ends the way the trilogy started – it’s all about Peter and MJ. The bittersweet final image of the couple, reunited but not necessarily romantically reconciled, shows where Spider-Man 3’s priorities lie in character, not spectacle.
Spider-Man 3 returns to cinemas on 16 August.
