Spider-Man: Movie Reflections of a Super Hero Part 1 – The Announcement

1999 was one of the heavier years for me in terms of the number of books on my pull list. On the DC side of street, I was reading all of the Superman titles, a handful of the Bat Family titles (Nightwing, Robin, and Catwoman), JLA, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Young Justice, and a bunch of other books I won’t mention because this sentence is getting out of control. When it came to Marvel I was buying Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and Hulk.

I was also collecting Spider-Man for the first time.

Looking back, it’s really weird that it took me so long to give collecting Spider-Man a go. The character had been one of the heavy hitters in mainstream comics for the bulk of my collecting career up to that point, but I never had the desire to start picking up his books.

That changed in late 1998.

Starting in 1996, Marvel began bringing a number of their long-running series to an end and replacing them with a new series and a new number one. In September of 1998 it was Spider-Man’s turn. Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man, and Peter Parker: Spider-Man all came to an end and two months later new volumes of Amazing Spider-Man and Peter Parker: Spider-Man began.

It wasn’t the number one issues that made me want to finally hop on the Spider-Man train. Not entirely. It was the fact that John Byrne, the man that wrote and drew the books that got me to start collecting the Superman titles, was going to be writing and drawing a new, updated version of Spider-Man’s early years in the form of a limited series titled Spider-Man: Chapter One. My thinking was that if Byrne could get me to be a Superman fan he might be able to do the same for Spider-Man.  

Spoilers…it didn’t.

I bought all of Spider-Man: Chapter One, but I stopped buying Amazing and Peter Parker towards the end of 1999. They didn’t grab me. I gave it a go, but ultimately it didn’t take.

The fact that it was not the best era of Spider-Man probably had something to do with it.

But I was still reading the books in April of 1999, and it was during that month that Marvel placed this ad in most of the titles it published.

This was monumental. The film rights to Spider-Man had finally been resolved.

(Also, take the time to read the ad. It’s funny.)

I remember being really excited about this. Despite only recently (at the time) starting to collect the Spider-Man books I always liked the character. Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends was one of my favorite cartoons when I was a kid and the few episodes of the Fox Kids series that I managed to watch (I was in my late teens and early twenties when that show was a thing and was either working or sleeping on the Sunday mornings they aired here in Georgia) were a lot of fun. I also liked super hero movies. For me, this was a win-win situation.

What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how big of a deal those rights getting sorted out was. The short version of the story is that Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (the people behind The Cannon Group, the studio behind such hits as Delta Force and American Ninja) bought the film rights to Spider-Man in 1985. After those two split up the rights went to Golan’s new company 21^st Century film, who then sold the theatrical rights to Carolco, the studio behind The Terminator and the first three Rambo films. To complicate things further the home video rights were sold to Columbia Pictures, and the television rights were sold to Viacom. James Cameron entered the chat at one point via Carolco and produced what has become known as a “scriptment”. Carolco sued Viacom and Columbia to consolidate the various rights and Viacom and Columbia countersued and even MGM got involved at one point.

There have been numerous articles written about this over the years and the headlines usually contain the term “untangling the web”, which is both obvious and appropriate.

And then, in 1998, Marvel emerged from its 1996 bankruptcy and the courts determined that the rights that it sold to Golan back in 1985 had expired. They also worked things out with MGM and Viacom and finally, in 1999, Marvel sold the rights to Sony for $7 million and formed a joint venture with the studio to handle the merchandise.

It was a whole thing.

I wasn’t aware of any of that in April of 1999. All I knew was that the Spider-Man movie was happening. I didn’t know that it would be three years before the film would be released, but I was excited, nonetheless.

Looking back, it’s interesting to think how certain I was that the movie would actually come out. Super hero movies were pretty much dead in Hollywood at this point. Yeah, Blade came out in 1998 and did well and X-Men would come out in 2000, but super hero films were, to quote Dolly Parton in the movie 9 to 5, the bastard at the family reunion after 1997. The Superman film that had been in some form of pre-production since the early nineties never happened. Rumors of a new Batman film that would follow Batman and Robin came to nothing. All signs pointed to the fact that Hollywood was not interested in getting back into the super hero business and here I was, all of 23 years old, completely sure that all of these movies that were in the rumor mill at the time were going to get made at some point.

To be clear, this wasn’t clairvoyance on my part. I wasn’t some sort of soothsayer for super heroes. I just really wanted them to happen and that manifested in me being sure they would happen.

I was in my early twenties. It was easy to be overconfident back then.

The fact that the genre eventually did take off again is a total coincidence.

If you want to know more about the entire history behind the attempts to bring Spider-Man to the big screen, including the various scripts (including the treatment by Stan Lee that was later adapted into a prose story by Peter David for the Ultimate Spider-Man short story anthology in 1995) check out this video from Supervoid Cinema. It’s two and a half hours long, but it is thorough.

I actually recommend watching all of the videos they have done about unmade super hero movies. The level of detail in them is amazing.

In the next installment, I will get into the months and years leading up to Spider-Man coming out. Yes, I will be writing about the teaser trailer and poster that had to get pulled from theaters.

More to follow…