10 Subplots That Saved Entire Movies

Spider-Man 3 is a deeply flawed movie, mostly due to too much studio oversight and too little letting Sam Raimi do his thing. But the subplot involving The Sandman was a thing of genius on Raimi's part.

Sandman was never the most interesting Spider-Man villain, just a kinda 2-dimensional villain through and through. And for a villain of the month comic series, there's nothing wrong with that. But Raimi, being one of the biggest Spidey nerds in Hollywood, found the right dynamic to make Flint Marko work in a movie.

Sandman started off as a petty criminal, but through a quirk of fate, now has the powers of a God. Raimi has this version of Sandman ask "okay...now what?" This not only led to arguably the best scene in the movie, where Flint quietly emerges from the experiment a being made entirely of sand, but made Marko infinitely more sympathetic as he tries to grapple with what he's become and whether he REALLY wants to use these insane powers to rob banks like a common thug.

Sure the part where it's revealed that he's the one who killed Uncle Ben was pretty damn contrived and was about as necessary as Batman 89 having Joker be Joe Chill (i.e. it wasn't) but beyond that, an otherwise wonky movie in terms of quality was dragged over the line into being pretty damn good by this one character's story.