Is Sam Raimi responsible for the superhero trend in cinema?
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The weird reason Tobey Maguire’s ‘Spider-Man’ shoots organic webs
How does Spider-Man shoot webs? It’s a question that every superhero fan wants to know the answer to (whether they know it or not). The webs of Andrew Garfield’s version of the character in The Amazing Spider-Man were made through a specific wrist-wearing device, and for Tom Holland in the most recent movies, a similar explanation is made. But for Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, the answer is a little ickier.
In the classic Raimi movies from the early 2000s, Spider-Man shoots organic web fluid from his wrists in a move that is increasingly more disturbing the more you think about it. It was a concept that was leftover from the unmade Spider-Man movie originally conceived by filmmaker James Cameron in the early 1990s, between his work on Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 and True Lies in 1994.
Originally, Cameron liked the idea of the white webbing being a (filthy) metaphor for puberty in which the hero would awake in the morning of his newfound powers with ‘web-filled’ sheets. Thankfully, this scene never materialises in Raimi’s version of the film, even though he did opt to put Spider-Man’s revelatory scene, in which he discovers his web-slinging powers, after having a conversation with his love interest, Mary Jane Watson.
The decision made sense, with the web being merely another part of Peter Parker’s transformation, but this didn’t stop the Sony and Marvel executives from making the device a little more comic-accurate in later movies.
Speaking to Yahoo in 2015, the comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis told the publication about how he was brought on for Disney’s Spider-Man movies and was given the casting decision as to whether the titular character got organic or man-made web-slingers. “They sat me down in Amy Pascal’s office with this big roomful of producers and writers and directors, and she looked at me and said, ‘Organic web-shooters or mechanical web-shooters?’” he stated.
Continuing, he explained: “I said, ‘mechanical,’ and half the table said, ‘Goddamn it!’ They were mad because I was clearly the deciding vote, even though I didn’t know that. So when I see the mechanical web-shooters, I feel a little happiness. I feel like I did something good in the world”.
Changing public opinion on comic book movies with the release of Spider-Man in 2002, Raimi created a fine balance between frenetic comic-book action and romantic melodrama with the strange, awkward energy of Tobey Maguire becoming the perfect actor to take on such a role.
A superhero designed for the innovations in cinema at the dawn of the new millennium, Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker would become the poster child of a new 21st-century cinematic spectacle, swinging around the skyscrapers of New York with a supreme grandeur that audiences had never witnessed before on the silver screen. Though Raimi’s title character was no omnipotent movie hero. Truthful to the comic books, Spider-Man was a shy, anxious geek, who only truly comes into himself when he puts on the tight red suit.
