Stop me if you have heard this one: SPIDER-MAN 3 wasn't a very good movie. In fact, it was pretty bad, just a rather large misstep giving the previous installments were great and many people, myself included, still hold SPIDER-MAN 2 to be the best superhero movie ever made. Sam Raimi directed the trilogy and understandably agrees with the majority of people who thought SM3 was a total mess. Raimi appeared on The Nerdist podcast this week and he spoke at length about his time with the SPIDER-MAN franchise.
Speaking about the film series, Raimi bluntly says "…I messed up plenty with the third Spider-Man." He goes on to talk about the challenges of making a big-budget superhero movie saying "each and every one of those Spider-Man films was pretty damn challenging."
In regards to SM3 he admits:
It’s a movie that just didn’t work very well,” I tried to make it work, but I didn’t really believe in all the characters, so that can’t be hidden from people who loved Spider-Man. If the director doesn’t love something, it’s wrong of them to make it when so many other people love it. I think [simply trying to raise the stakes after Spider-Man 2] was the thinking going into it, and I think that’s what doomed us, I should’ve just stuck with the characters and the relationships and progressed them to the next step and not tried to top the bar.
Raimi also touched on the idea that some other folks behind the film wanted the bigger is better approach:
The goal wasn’t to try to top the other pictures, it was to tell a bigger story but with a different sensibility about it. But I wasn’t trying to top. That isn’t a good approach. That went into the thinking of a lot of people who worked on Spider-Man 3, and it was not good for us.
I’m more likely to believe that it was the busy hands of a few suits wanting to play filmmakers that got involved and made too many mistakes with SPIDER-MAN 3 come to fruition. Looking at the trilogy together, it still amazes me that SM3 is related to the first two movies. I know, it's old hat and redundant to kick the movie after all these years, but dammit it could have been great! Sam Raimi is still one hell of a visionary in my opinion and I can't wait to see what the future holds for him. Speaking of the future, we do know that he’s working on the Ash vs. Evil Dead TV series, so there’s that.
How do you feel about SPIDER-MAN 3 after all these years?