Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films (along with the X-Men movies) really set the bar for the past fifteen years of comic features, proving that complex characterisation, sympathetic villains and a huge sense of fun can all have places in superhero movies. Which makes it all the more upsetting that his Spider-Man 3 was such a mess. It's by no means a complete disaster of a film, but the studio meddling and significant shift in tone to the previous two films meant that people were alienated from a franchise they had previously become comfortable with. We could list each and every bad decision made in the making of Spidey 3, but there's one that stands greasy head and black, oily shoulders above the rest, and that's Peter Parker's dark side. The emo haircut is bad enough on its own, but Raimi's decision to overplay the douchebag effect that the Venom symbiote has on Spidey was one of his poorest. And the table-dancing, audience-winking sequence was almost certainly the final nail in the coffin for the Raimi/Maguire iteration of Spider-Man movies.
