Hard to believe it’s been a decade since we were reporting about comic fans’ outrage that the movie version of Marvel’s wall-crawling superhero SPIDER-MAN would feature organic web-shooters rather than the character’s traditional mechanical ones (a furor that even prompted an obviously failed online anti-organic campaign attempting to battle the idea).
But director Marc Webb clearly wanted to get away from the wrist-jizz and return to the comic origins for his reboot THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and went straight to the Man for advice: “I had a meeting with Stan Lee and we talked about the web-shooters,” Webb tells Hero Complex. “I was curious about the incarnation of them [because] of course in the previous films [they went away from them] and we wanted to reestablish ourselves. That was one thing but the other thing was the fact that the web-shooters were able to dramatize Peter’s intellect and I thought that was really cool.”
“It was in the comics and we have a different design but it’s a cool element to have,” Webb says. “It’s not something we over-use or over-exploit. To me, it’s something I remember from when I was a kid and thinking ‘It would be cool if I could build those.’“
Webb also says that carries over into the design of the outfit: “We paid attention to the question of ‘How would a kid make it?’ And obviously we took some license with it.“
“With the costume and the web-shooters we wanted to emphasize that these are things that Peter Parker made and that he is special himself even if he feels like he’s an outsider.”
Sony’s 3D relaunch stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, Rhys Ifans, Sally Field, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Julianne Nicholson, Irrfan Khan and Annie Parisse. Our high-haired hero swings into theaters on July 3, 2012.