'Spider-Man' Director Sam Raimi Explains How Comic Book Movies Can Have A New Age Of Success
Spider-Man director Sam Raimi recently shared his thoughts on how comic book movies can have a new age of success with the obvious implication that they are currently on the decline.
In an interview while promoting his film Send Help, Raimi was asked, “What do you think needs to happen for us to have a Silver Age of comic book movies?”
He answered, “I think whenever the writer and director and producer focus on the character and do so truthfully it can work. And it can work great.”
“So many excellent stories — I mean these are heroes — there’s decades of great material in the books written by those bullpens, whether at DC, Marvel, or Dark Horse. The material is there waiting for you to bring that character to life.”
“I think nothing is missing,” he continued. “I think they’re on a really good track. Excited to see another really great superhero movie.”
Raimi is not alone in calling for faithful and honest adaptations of tried and true stories to find success.
Quentin Tarantino made similar comments back in 2023 while discussing what the future of James Bond should be. He informed Deadline, “What I think they should do, and I’ve been thinking they should do this for a long time, is so many of the books have these really classic names and really classic adventures. And for the most part, a lot of them, they never did the book. They never did the stories.”
“They took the plot line and maybe the Bond girl or maybe the villain and then just went their own way,” he explained. “Tom Mankiewicz just goes his own way. He did the writing for a lot of them. I think they should not remake the movies but actually just do the books, but do them the way they were written. And those would all be brand new.”
Some examples of great stories that Marvel and DC have not adapted include:
These and many others are right there for the picking, but it would require the people in charge of Marvel and DC Studios to stop engaging in what G.K. Chesterton described in Heretics as “the great march of mental destruction” where “everything will be denied.”
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Raimi could do decent Spider-Man and Doctor Strange movies, if the Studio would allow it.
They won't.
Pity, as no one in Hollowood understands Steve Ditko and his work like Sam Raimi does.
He’s one of the last white guy’s that can be unapologetically white in the industry today. Most of the mid 2000ers were grandfathered in.
The primary problem lies with the fact that the majority of all the mid-level executives and ALL creatives are white women or people of color who hate white guys, and are using our stuff as a vehicle to scold us….. because they’re not us, and the envy is consuming.
I don’t see this bitterness being solved, or rooted out anytime soon so, using my limited prognostication skills, I don’t believe we will ever return to “the salad days”.