In the previous installment I wrote about how the 2002 Spider-Man film got announced. This week I thought it would be fun to look at the various trailers for the movie and how the marketing for the film evolved over time. I thought I was going to spend a lot of time on a certain teaser that had to get pulled because of real world events, but I found some other stuff that I had never seen before (that I assume most other people have) and this installment became a lot more interesting.

To me, at any rate.

Before I get into the trailers for the 2002 (originally 2001) film, I wanted to share this.

The trailer mentions Joe Zito, who was attached to the Cannon Group Spider-Man movie circa 1985-1986. But that’s not the most interesting part of that trailer. It was the music. I am fascinated by the fact that they used the bit of the score to Superman The Movie where Zod, Ursa, and Non are sent to the Phantom Zone to promote a Spider-Man film. That sort of thing is pretty on brand for Cannon, so I’m not all that surprised.

Still…weird.

The earliest trailer I was able to find is listed as being for ShoWest, a convention for theater owners that was later rebranded as CinemaCon.

The Spider-Man logo in this trailer is different from the one Sony would eventually land on. It’s much more comic book in style. What I found interesting is that the spider web animation from the opening of the 2002 film was in place all the way back in 2000.

The next two are videos that I found on YouTube that I don’t have any concrete info on them. They’re obviously teasers and one of them even has some bits and bobs showing off behind the scenes drawings and interviews, but they both contain something that would later be discarded for the final film.

I either had no idea that they were going with mechanical web shooters at one point or I had forgotten it.

Then there was the big teaser trailer.

I remember watching this on a friend’s computer back in 2001, which sounds commonplace, but in the early 2000s videos on the Internet were complicated affairs. There wasn’t a centralized place to find them nor was there a centralized way to play them, forcing you to find the appropriate plug ins to get the things to work.

This trailer was pulled after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. There was a teaser poster that had to be pulled as well that had the Twin Towers reflected in one of Spider-Man’s eye pieces. It is one of those rare times when a real-world event forces a studio to scramble to pull something in the dual effort of being sensitive to audiences and not wanting to avoid negative press.

Now it’s an artifact and, in all honesty, a pretty elaborate piece for a teaser trailer. The bank robbery does not appear in the film, so if 9/11 didn’t happen it would have been one of those trailers that promotes a movie but has stuff that doesn’t appear in the film on purpose. As opposed to all of the times, stuff is in the trailer that later ends up getting cut or changed.

By the time the second teaser trailer came out the marketing of the movie was pretty locked down. A font was created for all of the text and the “taking the ultimate spin” line was in place. The music in this teaser is very, very, VERY early 2000s. The footage is mainly of Spider-Man swinging through the city, which makes sense. Superman The Movie had to make you believe a man could fly. Spider-Man had to make you believe that a man could swing from a web and have that be believable.

Finally, the main trailer.

Again, the music is very much on brand for early 2000s trailers. The shots that were chosen were big and colorful and give you a sense of the players of the film without revealing too much. There were lots of shots of Spider-Man swinging, again to show off that they had actually cracked the code on that. The Superman line at the end got a laugh from the audience the few times I got to see this in the theater. I chuckle at it now because the editing here has Peter looking at Aunt May after she says it like that is his reaction. In the film they share a laugh and that look comes later and has to do with Mary Jane.

And that’s it for this time. Next week I’ll go into some of the merchandise that came out in the lead up to the film and the excitement this movie generated for me personally.

More to follow…