5. The Amazing Spider-Man - Deja Vu
The Amazing Spider-Man was always going to be a tricky prospect. How do you reboot a superhero movie that was only 10 years old? How do you make it different enough to warrant the reboot, but similar enough to avoid the wrath of the fans? Well don't ask Marc Webb because he clearly doesn't know. As with all the movies on this list, TASM is not a terrible movie by any means. But it is an inferior one. Andrew Garfield's take on the character captured the snarkiness of Spider-Man but his Peter Parker comes off like a bit of a douche, Rhys Ifans' Lizard is disappointingly two dimensional when compared with Doc Ock from SP2 and, worst of all, we had already seen about half the movie ten years ago. There is always a danger, when rebooting a superhero, that the origin story becomes pretty tired and formulaic - a plot device which is necessary to explain why a person is running around in spandex. Some movies can get around it by tweaking just enough to make it feel fresh while others retread the same ground with a different actor. This is the case with TASM. Marc Webb must have had Sam Raimi's effort on repeat throughout production, as the entire first act ticks all the same boxes in nearly exactly the same way. Parker bitten by a spider, (altered) words of wisdom from Uncle Ben, dubious moral decision leading to Uncle Ben's death and Parker's decision to base his costume on a wrestler. This is a huge misstep as it immediately forces the viewer to compare this movie to Raimi's, something which many fans were already doing anyway. With Raimi's Spider-Man coming out in 2002, most people were already familiar with Peter Parker's origins so why bother including it in the first place? It would have been a smarter move if Webb had taken the Tim Burton route, and just introduce Spidey in all his glory at the start. By doing this he would have sent out a clear message that this is a complete reboot, not a rehash, and avoid any awkward comparisons. Hopefully, he will have learnt his lesson by the time The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits our screens.