Word: batmans
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Sony had a simple marketing campaign, with those billboards featuring a masked red-and-blue character and the release date (perhaps inspired by Warner Bros.' immensely successful tease for the Batman franchise in 1989). But the real genius was knowing what people cared about: the Date. It was also having a product that did not need marketing. "We knew that people know what Spider-Man is. We didn't want to come in with bombastic catchphrases," says Avi Arad, president of Marvel Studios. If a star saves 30 minutes of character exposition, a superhero probably saves a full hour...
...movie, 95% said they would recommend it to a friend; 70% said they would pay to see it again. (You usually have to bomb Baghdad to get that kind of approval ratings.) People have always liked Spider-Man: compared with the ultrasquare alien Superman and the brooding millionaire Batman, Spidey's an accidental superhero, a geeky and self-doubting teen, a comic-book character who seems a lot like a comic-book reader. Forty years after Spider-Man's birth, Marvel is still selling four different monthly Spider-Man titles that together add up to about 500,000 copies. "Everybody...
...little guy at the tail end of the Depression and upended the Nazi concept of the Ubermensch. "There was an enormous desire to see social justice, a rectifying of corruption," says DC Comics president Paul Levitz. "Superman was a fulfillment of a pent-up passion for the heroic solution." Batman, a morally ambiguous, revenge-driven crusader, emerged in 1939, at the outset of World War II, as the darker side of the heroic solution. Then when America entered the war, straightforwardly patriotic heroes like Captain America and Wonder Woman hit Hitler where he lived...
Hollywood loves comic books, from the Blondie and Dick Tracy B movies of the '30s and '40s to the more recent big-budget franchises of Superman and Batman. There are times (say, every summer) when American movies seem to be one gigantic, endless comic book. The film industry has long been buggy about creepy crawlers too. In the '50s it spawned the mammoth postnuclear monsters of Them (ants) and Tarantula, and 30 years later it bankrolled David Cronenberg's magnificent remake...
...rest of your life." Why shouldn't there be growing pains in the Spider-Man movie? Just as Peter's transformation is a process of trial and error, so the series may be able to mature in the planned sequels. The James Bond, Star Wars and Batman series show that first episodes are often outshone by later installments...