You guys still with me after last night's Spider-Man fiasco? I just wanna add a few more of my own personal thoughts on Sony's shocking throwing in of the towel on the successful Spidey franchise it took them ten years to build and their sudden, rather despicable setting of a new precedent that has left me disheartened for the future of comic book movies, and dejected as a life-long Spider-Man fan. Let me take you back to one of my favourite Spider-Man comic stories... When a young adult Peter Parker throws the Spidey costume in the trash can in Stan Lee's famous Spider-Man: No More story in Amazing Spider-Man No. 50, it moved me emotionally as a teenage reader. The story turned out to be a pivotal moment for the life of the character and forever taught me the lesson that it's too easy to give up, it's too easy to leave your responsibilities behind but the right thing to do is to keep on fighting, pull your socks up and just get on with it. The world keeps on revolving and so do you. Buckle up because life's a long and tough ride and it's supposed to be. No good comes from getting things easy. Of course a reboot button in real life would be good and useful but we would go back to the well too often - we would never be satisfied with our situation and we wouldn't worry about making the best of each and everyday because we know we could always go back and change what went before. Have a do-over. Restart. Reboot. Whatever. That's the dangerous precedent that Sony are playing with here and why we will never care in the future when Peter Parker is in trouble and in a seemingly life-threatening position because not only now do we know that he won't be killed off but we also know that even if he was, they could just press the reboot switch whenever they liked and hey presto... Parker's back in high school and there's Flash and Mary Jane, and oh boy... we are back here again. I don't know if I could sit through that once more, it's already taken up half of ONE movie, 1/6th of the current film franchise. I just feel like Sony have chucked away something good and rarely does the business have something this good to throwaway. They spent millions and millions of dollars on gaining our trust and they had it from movie no. 1 thanks to Sam Raimi's passionate love for the character and his incredibly faithful adaptation of the web-slinger's origin story but from this point on - I just don't see how we as movie fans can ever trust Sony as a company anymore, or maybe even Hollywood as a whole with big franchises. Universal and Marvel tried it with The Incredible Hulk but you know, you could at least see some reasoning in it. Marvel won back the rights to the big green superhero and wanted to inject him into their Avengers building universe and Ang Lee's movie never did catch on, so we let that one mostly pass. It was a bad movie, of course - and we probably won't now see a stand-alone character sequel but by the by, The Incredible Hulk didn't cause anyone any offence. But Spider-Man is different, because Sam Raimi's first movie is probably the best origin comic book movie out there and Spider-Man 2, just might be the most faithfully adapted superhero story on record. I can't imagine any new director's vision with his first two movies matching up to what Raimi did here. When it comes round to Comic Con's Spider-Manpresentation either this year or next, I think we as a collective online film community should give Sony hell. We supported the Spider-Man franchise, we trusted them, wrote millions of words and thousands of articles about the importance of the series and we truly believed when they said they were wanting it to grow like the James Bond series. I once heard that Spider-Man could have gone on to a dozen different movies before something like this and to pull the reboot trick less than three years after only the third movie - well it's just not good enough, and if it wasn't for my love of the character - I would have boycotted any further talk of this series for the rest of the decade. Can you imagine the Jason Bourne series rebooting next time around and showing us his origins again - or after Goldfinger, rebooting Bond back to Dr. No? How about one more Batman movie for Chris Nolan then BOOM! - back to that night when Joe Chill killed Martha and Thomas Wayne. Good luck J.J. Abrams, you might have to time travel to another alternative universe for your third Trek voyage. The whole thing just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and I'm struggling to find any positives. I could understand it and I have fully supported the idea of Marvel going the reboot route with both The Fantastic Four series and Daredevil franchises but Spider-Man 3 was until last summer, the highest grossing opening weekend of ANY MOVIE OF ALL TIME and it made $336 million domestic. Despite it's lack of quality (it still has some good bits - the Sandman was an interesting villain and I mostly liked the Gwen Stacy stuff) - it didn't leave the franchise in a mess. It didn't kill off a lead character or leave it with a continuity problem. If nothing else - it opened up a chance for a whole new direction, and if they so wished, they could have even changed the cast/director if they didn't like where Sam Raimi was taking it - that's fine. All the events in the past have happened and you could have acknowledged it but you could have changed the tone darker/softer, and had any villain you liked baring Green Goblin, Harry Osbourne and Dr. Ock. The rest you could have brought back or started with a new villain as yet untapped. But to do this - well in some ways it's would be akin to George Lucas making Star Wars: A New Hope three years after Return of the Jedi. It's kinda hard to swallow, ain't it?