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Box Office: 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' May Doom Us To Endless Reboots

This article is more than 6 years old.

Sony and Marvel

Okay, now I am officially impressed. Sony’s Spider-Man: Homecoming is the biggest-grossing comic book superhero movie of 2017, a year that has contained a high number of well-received and quite successful offerings in said sub-genre. The $175 million reboot, which started over and put Peter Parker into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has earned $330.6m in North America from a $117m debut weekend. That’s a 2.8x multiplier, bigger than all MCU movies save for Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, The Avengers and Iron Man. It’s awfully close to the $333m domestic total of Guardians of the Galaxy, and it has recently surpassed the $863m worldwide cume of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

The Tom Holland/Michael Keaton/Zendaya/Robert Downey Jr./Marisa Tomei action-comedy has earned more in North America than Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.'s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which snagged a massively frontloaded $330 million cume from a $166m opening weekend back in March of 2016. And while Spider-Man: Homecoming isn’t quite at that film’s $873m global cume, it may well get there and at the very least left its franchise in a much healthier place for the next installment. Sony and Marvel won’t be playing defense for Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 (or whatever it’s called) when it opens in July of 2019. Critics and audiences mostly embraced this second Spidey reboot in a way they didn’t with the first Spidey reboot.

We’ll see if the Jon Watts-directed movie will retain its crown after Walt Disney's Thor: Ragnarok and Warner Bros.' Justice League come and go in November. The film benefited both from good reviews and a lack of kid-friendly competition essentially from July to November of this year. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets stumbled, and that left the field wide open in terms of live-action kid-friendly multiplex fare. It’s not like The Dark Tower, Dunkirk, Atomic Blonde or The Hitman’s Bodyguard were kiddie flicks, and the likes of It, Kingsman, Blade Runner and Jigsaw won’t be either. So Spider-Man: Homecoming had the field to itself from its opening weekend until Thor: Ragnarok.

The domestic gross (more than the $291 million cume of Man of Steel) and worldwide gross (more than the $757m cume of The Amazing Spider-Man) means that Spider-Man: Homecoming is the biggest-grossing reboot ever. The bad news is that this is going to encourage studios to further reboot their older, once successful properties even if the first reboot attempt wasn’t entirely successful. I’ve written before about how The Amazing Spider-Man opened the floodgates for studios rebooting all of their old genre properties. But this is “worse,” in that Spider-Man getting the reboot trick right on the second try is going to encourage studios to keep giving us Terminator sequels or Alien prequels on the hope that it will eventually catch on.

Spider-Man: Homecoming was a hit partially because Spider-Man is arguably the planet’s most beloved comic book superhero. I’ve long argued that the Amazing Spider-Man franchise could have flourished with A) budgets under $200 million and B) narratives that just allowed them to be conventional “day in the life” Spider-Man stories instead of tying them into a bigger picture or expanded cinematic universe. Amazing Spider-Man 2 was (unfairly) vilified for its marketing campaign, as it was mostly a stand-alone Peter Parker movie with expanded universe nuggets as opposed to a glorified backdoor pilot that it was sold as/presented as to the media and shareholders. So it’s ironic that the MCU gave us the most stand-alone Spider-Man movie since Spider-Man 2 in 2004.

That could be a “good” lesson from all of this. With all the handwringing over origin stories and cinematic universes, it should be noted that the Spidey reboot that actually worked was the one that ignored the origin completely and was a relatively stand-alone Peter Parker story. Yeah, Robert Downey Jr. had a glorified cameo, and Michael Keaton’s Vulture had a very loose connection to the events of The Avengers, but this is almost as standalone a MCU movie as Thor: The Dark World or Guardians of the Galaxy. Heck, that’s the case for most of the comic book movies this year. Wonder Woman was stand-alone origin story, Guardians 2 was a straight sequel and Logan was a disconnected series finale.

If the comic book superhero movies have done a good job diversifying themselves in terms of content and narrative, then maybe Hollywood should learn that lesson when attempting to rip them off. We don’t need King Arthur movies that set up the dark/gritty origin story for the entire movie before making us wait for the sequel for the actual Round Table adventures. We don’t need Tom Cruise’s The Mummy to spend copious amounts of time setting up alleged sequels and "Dark Universe" spin-offs at the expense of the present-tense movie. And we don’t need Walt Disney Star Wars prequels which explain in intricate detail the merely hinted-at backstory of popular original trilogy icons. Audiences come for the characters, not for the world building.

But, again, I am concerned about the lesson to be learned as moviegoers shelled out huge piles of cash to see the third new version of Spider-Man in 15 years, as well as the six (or seventh counting Civil War) Spider-Man movie in 1.5 decades. And it’s especially concerning to see a given property recover from a failed reboot, giving all kinds of false hope. It’s the kind of thinking that explains why we’re getting a third Terminator reboot despite the first two failing, or why another Superman movie was an inevitability even after Superman Returns stumbled. The Amazing Spider-Man opened Pandora’s Box. I fear Spider-Man: Homecoming may make that box impossible to close.

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