It's All on Sony

While there's never such thing as a sure thing, of the current crop of movies there are a couple of films that have been almost predestined to succeed. Disney's The Avengers, for example, with its unique marketing campaign that included five other movies of the individual characters as part of its strategy, was always going to be a hit, even though the eventual magnitude of its success came as a bit of surprise. Warner Bros' The Dark Knight Rises is another preordained success, and even if it doesn't end up the year's top-grossing movie it'll be all right because the franchise is scheduled for a reboot immediately afterwards.

20th Century Fox's Prometheus has long been expected to succeed as it is currently doing, and it'll take some ill fortune for the upcoming Brave to break Pixar's long running streak of movies that have grossed at least half a billion dollars at the global box-office.

For me, though, the biggest question mark of this season remains to be Sony Pictures' reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, which marks the studio's attempt to revitalize the franchise following the widely perceived failure of the last installment, Spider-Man 3, to live up to the lofty standard laid down by the first two films of the series. The concern that's been raised by a number of online fans (including myself, actually) is that the reboot is coming too soon after the last movie. This is a two-edged sword; it could be too soon in that it's trying too early to supplant the still-beloved first two films, or too soon in that fans are still smarting from how bad the last film in the series was. Either way, reaction on the internet seems to be largely mixed to negative.

To Sony's credit, though, in deciding to reboot the series they've tried to fix what was missing from the first three movies and have added the two crucial "W"s to Peter Parker's arsenal, namely webshooters (mechanical as opposed to his biological ones) and wisecracks. Fans who have grown up with Spider-Man comics know that the webshooters are a key part of the mythology; they're testament to the fact that far from being just another musclebound lunkhead in spandex, Spider-Man is, in fact, brilliant, and one of the smartest people in the Marvel Universe. The wisecracks are similarly integral to Spider-Man's personality and have been since the very beginning. The whole dichotomy of Spider-Man is that when he's Peter Parker, he's shy and unassuming, but when he dons the mask and tights he assumes a confidence that otherwise isn't there. Raimi's first movie in the series featured Spidey mocking the wrestler played by the late Randy Savage, but they never really picked up on it beyond that, which was disappointing. Still, as the saying goes, haters gotta hate.

Between the Marvel fanatics who want Sony to lose their rights to Spidey to Disney/Marvel, the Raimi zombies who revere his original trilogy and want this new direction to fail, and the rabid fans of Christopher Nolan who want any movie that poses even the slightest threat to their beloved Batman to crash and burn, it's not entirely clear which demographic is going to actually go out and see this movie. Having laid relatively low with their advertising earlier in the year, in the wake of the success of The Avengers, Sony is going all out on its advertising campaigns for the web slinger, employing everything from viral videos to b-roll footage online. A few posts ago I questioned the wisdom of Disney's saturation-style advertising for The Avengers but given the breakout success of that film I have to concede it was a wise move and think that Sony is playing it safe by following this lead. They know they've got a lot to live up to, and that TASM has to make a lot of money in the two weeks before Nolan's next Batman movie hits theaters.

The good news for Sony and everyone wanting the new Spider-Man movie to succeed, however, is that as important as the internet has become, things posted on it are far from indicative of how a movie will eventually fare at the box office. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of The Avengers, rare was the internet pundit, whether a box-office analyst or a casual fanboy, who predicted that the film would do significantly better at the box-office than the first Iron Man film. Even boxofficemojo.com, my most trusted site for box-office numbers and forecasts, predicted only a $420 million U.S. gross for the film after its record breaking $207 million opening weekend. For those not in the know, The Avengers is now poised to become only the third film in history to gross $600 million in the United States alone (the only one not directed by James Cameron), and it's already grossed $1.4 billion around the world.

Of course, the bad news for Sony in the wake of the astonishing success of The Avengers is that the bar has now been set ridiculously high. I, for one, am already taking for granted that TASM will not scale the heights reached by Spidey's fellow Marvel heroes, but I'm holding out hope that, with its earnestness towards correcting the mistakes of the past series, this new movie can at least restore respectability to the franchise, the way Batman Begins did for the Batman series back in 2005, and make some money in the process, regardless of whether or not it ends up on top of the box-office charts by year's end.