Spiderman, your favorite super hero now more Fixation with youth but wait for 2012. The departure of star Tobey Maguire and star Sam Raimi from the latest instalment in the Spider-Man franchise demonstrates the studios' obsession with young audiences. What a web of intrigue is spinning around the fourth instalment of the Spider-Man movie franchise. It has been announced that the current production is being abandoned and that the movie’s star, Tobey Maguire, and director, Sam Raimi – both of whom were also central to the first three instalments – are out of the picture. Spider-Man 4 was due for release next year, but Sony Corp’s Columbia Pictures says the franchise is being “rebooted” and that the next instalment will be in cinemas in the summer of 2012. There is no indication yet of who the main players will be, but it has already been revealed that the story will not be a continuation of the current narrative.
Details are sketchy, but apparently the focus will be on Peter Parker’s school days, during which his molecular structure is transformed by the bite of a radioactive spider – exactly the same scenario featured in the first Spider-Man movie, released in 2002.

Such drastic treatment of a well-established, mega-budget franchise is extremely rare in Hollywood. Receipts so far have been good: the first three instalments averaged $800 million at the box office. However, the movies are not cheap to make, and production costs of Spider-Man 3 have been put at between $250 million and $300 million.

With such huge sums involved, a studio can’t afford it if the resulting film bombs at the box office, and it’s rumoured that there were increasing anxieties about the script for Spider-Man 4 – this despite Maguire’s upbeat reassurance to the LA Times at the end of last week that, “we have a lot of great stuff in terms of story and script. We’re just trying to dial it in and get it ready as quickly as possible.”

What the whole farrago reveals most tellingly about Hollywood is its burgeoning obsession with targeting young audiences. Sending your central character back to the classroom could hardly be a more obvious indication that you are rebooting your franchise specifically for the High School Musical generation.

But the lesson may well turn out to be that recycling isn’t always best for the planet.


source:telegraph.co.uk