Welcome to the Comparative Opinions podcast! This week, hosts Holly and David review Spider-Man Homecoming. A bit of non-spoiler territory at first, then they transition into talk about what was great in this movie in spoiler territory. TL;DR: It wasn’t bad, yay!
Also please note: this was recorded before we knew that the new Doctor was being announced on Sunday the 16th, the day this posts! So some of the speculation is being answered with that!
Comparative Opinions is a weekly half-hour-ish podcast hosted on ComparativeGeeks.com. Subscribe for new episodes every Sunday!
We saw Spider-Man Homecoming over the weekend, and we liked it! Still mulling it over to talk about (will probably be a podcast). So I thought I would ask: what did you think?
Coming soon to a theater near you, one of the biggest names in superheroes, one of the oddest behind-the-scenes franchise negotiations… Spider-Man Homecoming! After the abrupt ending to their last Spider-Man movie series 3 short years ago in Amazing Spider-Man 2, lots happened to bring us a Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It’s a new Spider-Man (well, the one we saw in Captain America: Civil War). It’s the third actor playing Spider-Man in recent memory. It’s only a few short years since the hot mess that was the last film. It’s still Sony’s property, even with the MCU connection. However, there’s plenty of Marvel cooperation as well. The trailers look good. There’s Iron Man. There is simultaneously a lot to say against this movie, and a lot going for it.
I mean, the most important thing in there is that the trailers look pretty good. In the end, give us a good movie.
Still, the questions I see are both, how are they going to give us that good movie? And what are they planning to do from there?
There are a number of characters that you can put on screen that really just don’t need introduction. Many of them are superheroes, with the like of Spider-Man and Batman where people know and get it. There are also literary figures like Sherlock Holmes that need no introduction and you can dive into the thick of things. Or there are characters like James Bond, who have had so many actors playing the character without an origin that when you finally try to do one – like they’ve done with the Daniel Craig movies of late – it gets a little weird.
Moreover, we’ve already seen this character on screen, in Civil War. He already had his powers, had a suit, had connections with Tony Stark, lived with just his Aunt May… One of the things that has been nice in the MCU is they have avoided doing much backtracking or ret-conning. The movies have stayed fairly chronological, even incorporating the weekly TV show Agents of SHIELD into the flow of time.
There’s a notable exception with Captain America: The First Avenger, just because his origin story happened decades in the past – but they caught you up to the contemporary moment when Cap is woken up. There have been a few other flashback sorts of moments, like the Hank Pym backstory in Ant Man, or Doctor Strange starting basically during the events of Civil War before a time jump ahead. Okay fine, also, all of Agent Carter. But the fact that I can sit here and name specific notable exceptions to this rule means that they have largely held to it.
Recently in Wonder Woman, we got thrown back to see the origin story for her after she had already been seen on screen in the franchise, in Batman v. Superman. So this is actually probably the best compare and contrast movie. Wonder Woman as a character hasn’t had a movie before, unlike the several recent Spider-Man films. Spider-Man has also had a number of TV shows in the time between the famous Linda Carter Wonder Woman and now, although Wonder Woman has shown up in plenty of animated Justice League TV. Still, one is a character who has had lots of screen time over time, and one who has not – so the argument is there for Wonder Woman to be an origin film (even if it’s framed by the present day and is technically all a flashback), and for Spider-Man Homecoming to not be an origin story.
They can really just dive into it. Please, please, I hope they do. Sure, we’ll probably see Uncle Ben die at some point. Don’t lead with that. Bring it in later. Integrate it into the story. Don’t make the origin story a checklist item you feel like you need to check off.
I mean, to be sure, there are ways they could have angled for an origin story here. A Miles Morales Spider-Man would be the top reason to do that, I think, and I’m still disappointed they didn’t go this way.
But at this point, the part has been cast for a while, they didn’t go this way, and that’s not changing anytime soon. So we’re getting yet another Peter Parker, which means again: please, we know who Peter Parker is. Don’t feed us an origin story, tell us a new story. Tell us a good story.
We had previously heard that the later movies were potentially not connected to the MCU, but were back in a Sony-run cinematic universe. I guess Sony is hoping they can keep cashing in on Marvel’s success, as they are working on talking about their next movies now with the imminent release of Homecoming.
For instance, it seems their plans of making a Venom movie are still a thing, now with Tom Hardy in talks for the lead (maybe as Agent Venom?). Venom wouldn’t be hard to introduce into the MCU, with an increasing amount of stuff happening in space. It would be much harder to introduce in an independent movie with no tie-in.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still thinking about the Sinister Six movie they were setting up to compete with Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy. Characters like Vulture and Shocker – appearing in Homecoming – have been members of this villain team-up before. And they use technology to fight Spider-Man, so there’s a source to that technology, and some of the plot for Homecoming seems to revolve around the villains getting their hands on and also selling this powerful tech. It could be an origin for this – much like they were trying to do with Oscorp in Amazing Spider-Man 2.
So these future movies – and a potential future Spider-Man film, I’m sure – could all make sense in the MCU. And I’m sure Sony is hoping to make these, because they had been previously planning a 4-movie (minimum) Amazing Spider-Man franchise along with stand-alone Venom and Sinister Six. Now it seems they’re trying to find a way to still pull that off, at least in terms of number of movies made.
But with Marvel’s plans for movies seemingly set between now and the as-yet untitled Avengers 4 in 2019, well, we’ll just have to see if Sony’s hopes pan out to be part of Marvel’s larger plans. Lots of the actor contracts end after Avengers 4, so it’s possible that might be that – or, that they’ll be looking for what to do for Marvel Phase 4 and Sony will be there waiting with a plan.
But if this movie sets up another larger movie franchise and those movies never happen, well, I don’t think Sony is likely to get a chance to do this a fourth time.
So it’s been a while since I played a Spider-Man video game (there was an excellent one on the original PlayStation), and while many of them have looked decent over the years, we haven’t picked up any to play.
That might have to change.
There aren’t a lot of games that we look at and say “we need the console for that.” Even now, with several games out for it that we would get, we’re still just kind of keeping the Nintendo Switch on the backburner. So color us surprised when this trailer led to that reaction.
But it looks so good! It has the look and feel of one of the Batman Arkham series games, which were great and Holly especially loved (though she still needs to play the third, and we’re not considering Origins in the mix…). Except you add to it all of the things Spider-Man can do, especially the Spider Sense which seems regularly useful, but also the web shooters and the way that they let you move through the environment. It’s unlike anything else, really.
Particularly surprising to me, however, was that the game is expected for release next year. I would have expected them to be aiming for release sometime around the movie release next month, although to be fair the game takes longer to develop. Better than that, however, is the fact that this is not a movie adaptation game, but an original story. The trailer shows Spider-Man on the phone with Kingpin, and that’s just awesome.
So who knows, maybe by the time it comes out it’ll be on more consoles than just the PS4 – although with Sony owning the movie rights to Spider-Man, and owning PlayStation, that might not be likely. Or maybe by then it won’t look as good, or the cost of a simpler PS4 will be lower as they release newer versions. Or there’ll be more games we want that are PS4 exclusive (like that Final Fantasy VII remake that’s at least one console generation late at this point…). But for now, we can bask in the thought that someday, we can play this game.
Welcome to the Comparative Opinions podcast! This week, hosts Holly and David consider the prevalence of journalism, as well as reading and literacy in general, in science fiction, fantasy, and comics properties… as well as the seeming lack of such in the Star Wars universe. Short answer: there’s a whole lot of journalism in fiction!
Comparative Opinions is a weekly half-hour-ish podcast hosted on ComparativeGeeks.com. Subscribe for new episodes every Sunday!
Comparative Geeks 