Rebooting the Spider-Man franchise will be no easy task for Marc Webb, the 500 Days of Summer director who has been handed that particular poisoned chalice. For every Batman Begins, there's a Superman Returns, and, unlike Christopher Nolan, who has successfully revived the fortunes of the Dark Knight, Webb isn't exactly involved with a superhero series that has fallen into complete ruin. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 may have been a little bland, but compared to Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, it was essential viewing. Studio execs ummed and aahed before finally cancelling the Toby Maguire webslinger – personally I would have backed Raimi to turn the series around, provided he was free of the studio interference that scuppered what turned out to be his final effort.
Webb has already decided – or been told – to take Spidey back to his high school years, not a bad decision as that's where the character began his life in the comics. A screenplay is being put together, and, according to the Heat Vision blog, the next step is casting the lead. Fortunately, all those horror stories about Robert Pattinson or Zac Efron seem to have been mere tabloid gossip: producers want a relative unknown for the part. Again, very sensible, as there's nothing like a famous face to destroy an audience's suspension of disbelief, and superhero movies already test cinemagoers' patience more than most in this regard.
If Heat Vision is to be believed, Webb might just be about to follow the lead of Kick-Ass's Matthew Vaughn and cast a Brit as New Yorker Peter Parker, who lives an amazing double life as Spidey. Jamie Bell, 24, best known for his early role as ballet-obsessed Billy Elliot, is being tipped as a frontrunner, while 19-year-old Frank Dillane, who played a young Tom Riddle in last year's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is also in with a shout. One assumes that execs have the Pattinson factor in mind here: the Twilight star made his name in a smallish role in one of the earlier Potter films.
Other candidates said to be under consideration include Andrew Garfield, who played Anton in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. He might be a little old for the role at 27, although Maguire was just a year younger when he began his stint as Parker. Then there's 20-year-old Alden Ehrenreich, who appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro in 2009, and baby of the pack Josh Hutcherson, 18, of Bridge to Terabithia and Journey to the Centre of the Earth fame.
The casting is said to be at an early stage, and no screen tests have yet been conducted, so the situation could easily change. I like both Garfield and Bell, but don't know a whole lot about the others. Whoever takes the role will need to be charismatic in a distinctly un-macho way. Bruce Wayne is the guy you admire from a distance, but wouldn't want to have a beer with: Peter Parker is the slightly geeky kid who turns out to be your new best friend. Maguire got this absolutely spot on – right up until the point where producers hamstrung him with a convoluted and over-fussy Spider-Man 3 storyline – and will be a tough act to follow.
What's of slightly more concern to me is Heat's synopsis of the movie, with the suggestion that it will be an "angst-ridden tale of a teen dealing with the knowledge that his uncle died even though he had the power to stop it". I know this is a reboot, and it's hard to delve far into the Spidey psyche without stopping to examine the effect the death of his uncle Ben had on him, but this sounds like a simple retread of Raimi's Spider-Man. Something a little smarter is needed, as it has only been eight years since that movie hit multiplexes. Nolan's Batman was a very different beast to that of Tim Burton or Joel Schumacher – Webb will also need to switch things up in terms of style and tone if his wallcrawler is to become the definitive version.
