Poll: Will The Amazing Spider-Man Cross $1 Billion Worldwide?

Earlier this week we ran a poll asking the What Culture audience on their opinion as to whether or not they believed Christopher Nolan's forthcoming The Dark Knight Rises would cross the $1 billion mark worldwide, just like The Dark Knight achieved four years ago. Thousands of you voted and the answer was a resounding "YES" but enough of you took part to give us the idea to pose the question again for the other high profile releases coming this year. This time the question is... will The Amazing Spider-Man cross $1 billion worldwide when it is released this July 1st, 2012? Vote for what you think below; So can the movie reach that elusive figure? Well let's have a look at the numbers.... Released in May 2002, the first Spider-Man film was a much bigger success than anyone expected and helped revived the superhero genre after the miserable down period of the 90's that culminated in the absolutely absurd release of Joel Schmaucher's Batman & Robin. Sam Raimi's movie hit a pop culture wave that nobody saw coming and took $403 million domestic to a total of $821 million worldwide. That film is still the biggest featuring characters from the Marvel Universe in the history of film despite the many films in the past ten years that have tried to top it and even amazingly it doubled the domestic gross of Batman Begins (2005). Two years later in June 2004, Sony released the sequel Spider-Man 2 which was another huge success, taking $373 million domestically and $783 million worldwide. This was a drop from the original film but still awesome numbers for the web-slinging franchise, and as the movie was even better than the original, it was tough to see why it didn't make as much as the original. My guess it had less repeat visits than the first film did as the original was such a phenomenon of a release in 2002 as there had truly been nothing like it. Continuing the strange down trend, Spider-Man 3 came three years later in May 2007 and again grossed less domestically, finishing on $336 million in the U.S. but actually more money globally than the first sequel, taking in $890 million worldwide. The fact the film wasn't all that good definitely hurt Spidey 3's domestic run as it came out of the blocks as actually the biggest opening weekend release of all time (a record it held for over a year until The Dark Knight smashed it) but Spider-Man was becoming a bigger and bigger global brand. Which leads us to The Amazing Spider-Man... Back in January 2010, Sony made the extremely brave decision to reboot their most successful franchise and the most successful comic book series in history when they hit the 'do over' switch and basically forced out original series director Sam Raimi and his cast of stars including Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. A lot of words have been written for why the decision was made to get rid of the actors but it all came down to two key points; 1) Sony wanted the Spider-Man films delivered their way - with the villains and actors they wanted - and Raimi was too much of a creative auteur to be a director for hire like the James Bond series had enjoyed for so long, where the EON producers were calling all the shots. Raimi was forced upon him Venom as a villain in Spider-Man 3, a character he never had much time for (Raimi was into the Stan Lee early day villains and wanted to make a story with The Sandman and Vulture, the latter played by Ben Kingsley) but Sony were adamant on Venom for his popularity with the current generation of fans and because of his merchandise potential. This is the reason why they even have a script in development for a potential Venom spin-off movie to hit somewhere down the line. Raimi gave them Venom but had no passion for Spider-Man 3 because of that and it showed in the final product. When the fourth movie came around, Raimi again wanted Vulture for Spider-Man 4 (this time with John Malkovich) and when Sony tried to get him to go in a different direction, after only a few months of pre-production, Sony did enough nuisance causing to force Raimi to bail on the project. 2) The paychecks were getting out of control - director Sam Raimi and stars Maguire & Dunst were on pay deals that were rolling and getting bigger and bigger the more movies that were being made. By a fourth film, the contracts had got up to a point where they were almost making $20 million each for another film, which would make it a whopping $60 million in wages to the budget before anything else is taken into consideration. Now if you look at how the Spider-Man films were performing, each movie was grossing less and less domestically as the films were garnering less repeat views and the quality of the third film in particular had turned a big portion of the audience away. Couple that with the fact the movies were costing more and more to make (partly because of the wages as mentioned above), Sony decided they had to make the decision to reboot because the profit margins (although still large) were diminishing. So what does this reboot all mean for The Amazing Spider-Man's final gross? Well first, Sony have to get fans interested in re-paying to see the very same origin story they witnessed ten years ago but told in a slightly different way. Sony have noticeably been keen to call it 'an untold story' quite loud in the marketing campaign, but more or less this is the story of how a geeky high schooler got bitten by a Spider and now web-slings around New York fighting crime. But anyway, they are getting over the message quite well and I think fans are genuinely interested in seeing how this new franchise differs to the old one. Andrew Garfield seems to be doing a good job of making Parker seem a bit cooler and less dweeby than Tobey Maguire did and I think that was a particularly smart move. The trailer dropped recently and I have to admit, the movie looks good. I don't particularly like how it has replaced Raimi's universe but I'll be there opening night to see it. Therefore I expect the movie to open huge but whether it has the legs to get to the $1 billion mark depends on whether it has good repeat business. Good repeat business means an awesome movie. That we can't yet decide on, obviously. They have a great cast with Garfield, Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy), Rhys Ifans (Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard), Denis Leary (Captain Stacy), Martin Sheen (Uncle Ben) and Sally Field (Aunt May) and a high-energy filmmaker in Marc Webb (5oo Days of Summer) but obviously we can't yet predict if this is a 4 or 5 star film that would bring with it repeat viewers. Mark our words though, for The Amazing Spider-Man to hit the $1 billion mark it needs repeat viewers, just like the Batman franchise did and The Lord of the Rings to cross over that line. Can The Amazing Spider-Man do it? I would love to hear your thoughts below and in the poll above!