Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, which saw Tobey Maguire taking on the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man across three massively lucrative features, have now taken on an even more revered status in the collective consciousness. Now there’s not only nostalgia informing people’s love for these films, but also positive comparisons to modern-day superhero movies. Compared to the overstuffed multiversal superhero fare dominating the 2020s, the Spider-Man films and their zippy accessible charms, not to mention imagery captured on film, are raved about. Still, there are some things about this incarnation of the character that have been criticized by comic book geeks for years. Perhaps one should say “thing” singular since there’s one particular element of this Spider-Man that really gets people’s goats.
That would be the decision to give Peter Parker organic webshooters that just come out of his wrists rather than the mechanical webshooters of both the comics and the two subsequent live-action Spidey movies. Largely despised and criticized by audiences over the years, this change may actually have been for the better after all.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the mechanical webshooters that Spider-Man is strapped with in almost all media. However, they’re also not inherently the only way he can or should produce webbing. It’s just another little gimmick with the character, not necessarily as defining for Spider-Man as, say, Batman’s utility belt or Superman’s red underwear. While subsequent Spider-Man movies have said that these webshooters reinforce Parker’s intelligence, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies constantly reaffirm that quality in Parker. There’s no need to accentuate further the intellect of the “brilliant, but lazy” Parker Tobey Maguire inhabits with little wrist gizmos.
The superfluousness of this quality of Spider-Man alone already makes it something that’s ripe for reinterpretation and overhauling when a live-action film adaptation rolls around. Leaning on this quality for the Spider-Man movie, meanwhile, benefits the creative vision of Sam Raimi and company on many fronts. For one thing, it emphasizes the puberty metaphor of Parker’s sudden ability to see without his glasses and climb up walls. His webbing signifying his maturity into adulthood wouldn’t quite function the same if it was just something he produced through a mechanical device.
For another, this detail emphasizes the heightened world that Raimi wove for his classical vision of Spider-Man. This isn’t just a world where you can explain away any weirdness with the fact that it’s some futuristic device — this is a world of pumpkin bombs, extravagant scene transitions, and super-pronounced Chad Kroeger songs. Of course, it’s also a world where a super-powered being can produce webbing from their wrists organically. Going this route with Spider-Man’s crucial webbing instantly alerts viewers that this is a gloriously stylized realm where anything is possible, much like the pages of a 1960s Marvel comic book.
The greatest benefit of opting for the organic webshooters instead of the comic-accurate mechanical webshooters is that this route inspired one of the most captivating Spider-Man stories in all of fiction, Spider-Man 2. This 2004 blockbuster hinged its plot on Peter Parker inexplicably losing his spider-powers, including the ability to produce organic webbing. He has no control over this, a scenario that wouldn’t be equally possible if he had control over the gizmo that produced his webbing. Taking control of his superpowers entirely out of Parker’s hands enhances Spider-Man 2’s internalized drama and inspires a captivating story.
Opening up the door for this kind of story that explicitly hinges on where Parker’s superpowers come from is already a big improvement over most Spider-Man comic book storylines, where it’s easy to forget wherever his webbing comes from. There’s such rich and deeply human material stemming from Raimi’s decision to eschew the webshooters, which already justifies this departure from the comics.
Plus, like Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opting for organic webbing shows a welcome willingness to eschew the source material if a better idea presents itself. Who wants to be beholden to the past when modern artists could follow their own exciting creative instincts? Would you rather see a rigid recreation of comic panels you’ve seen countless times before or something fresh and new? Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy constantly offered up the latter, with the embracing of organic webshooters being a prime example of that phenomenon. It’s hard to improve on source material as grand as those classic Spider-Man comics but opting for organic webshooters did just that.
What do you think of the organic web-shooters? Let us know in the comments below!
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, which saw Tobey Maguire taking on the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man across three massively lucrative features, have now taken on an even more revered status in the collective consciousness. Now there’s not only nostalgia informing people’s love for these films, but also positive comparisons to modern-day superhero movies. Compared to the Read More