(Previous Posts: PART 1, PART 2, PART 3)
The assumption behind “a status-quo rarely acknowledged outside comics” is that this will always be true. That is to say creators will always like a particular “default” idea of the character and reject/neglect later developments in the continuity. This idea offered by editors is essentially an attempt to prophesize without consultation the sentiments of future adapters of the character’s franchise. In practice, an attempt to “foreshorten” the character’s dimensions. It assumes that the viewpoints of a handful of Marvel editors in the late-2000s is representative of how everyone sees the franchise, and how everyone will always see it.
The attempt at “foreshortening” Spider-Man into a fixed conception of the character runs into a problem when the contrary is proven. For instance in 2018, we saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which featured two versions of Spider-Man, both as older adult heroes married to Mary Jane Watson. The defining speech of the film, where Mary Jane declares “we are all Spider-Man” and that anyone can wear a mask, has her referring to Peter as “my husband”. Likewise, the most successful video game of Spider-Man, the 2018 PS4 version featured an adult Spider-Man working outside college and whose storyline sees the loss of his Aunt, a story decision that Marvel tried to veto until the game developers successfully countered their sentiments [1].
[ASIDE:This latter incident is interesting because it implies that Marvel indeed tries to restrict and obstruct the conception of Spider-Man that outside creators might have.]
In 2014, as a fallout to a movie titled The Interview that parodied North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, hackers (presumably allied with North Korea, no direct evidence has ever been found) leaked several emails of Sony Pictures. These emails reveal personal correspondence between executives at Sony to other executives (inside Sony and outside) as well as several movie stars. The emails have since been archived by WikiLeaks. This bizarre incident is useful because it gives us a primary glimpse at the workings on behind the scenes of a major company, much of it unfiltered and free of the Public Relations and Marketing spin that most movie coverage and entertainment shows gather around them.
One of the hacked emails quotes Jeff Robinov, head of Studio 8, expressing an interest in adapting Kraven’s Last Hunt:
Another side of Spider-Man that might be interesting to explore in a reboot is seeing him as an adult. Spidey hasn’t remained a teenager over the 52 years he’s been around. He’s moved in with his girlfriend, gotten married, and in some storylines, even became a science teacher at a high school.
It might feel fresh to see Peter Parker juggling with adult issues. He’s done so in the comics for decades, and kids still found this fun to read.
Jeff Robinov [2]
In other words, a movie executive, not a comics expert by any means, expressed an interest to show an adult Spider-Man as a married man, acknowledging the reality that Peter Parker in the comics struggled with adult issues for decades. Now the fact that Sony Pictures did not go in this direction in 2014 might reveal that this idea was unpopular but the fact that it was uttered and proffered in email in a private executives-only session proves that this idea was certainly in the air, and considered valid for someone to put his name and backing behind (which in any high powered environment has the risk of lowering your reputation if your ideas be automatically outside the ken). Had the Andrew Garfield films succeeded, had this email not been hacked causing the company a major embarrassment, and a need to save face, which led to the 2016 reboot with Spider-Man in the MCU, we can well imagine that an adult married Spider-Man might have appeared eventually.
All that is to say, that superhero movies are still a relatively recent genre and that producers are cognizant that they have not adapted every aspect of the comics they have put on-screen, and that there’s a desire to tap into that material and bring it on-screen eventually, owing to the success of the genre and a need for novelty. One cannot claim that aspects of comics are forever out of reach or invalid just because a franchise doesn’t reflect it in a chosen interval.
Marvel Editorial is quick to prioritize the fact that Reed Richards and Susan Storm are an active married couple and committed to preserving their marriage. Yet it’s worth pointing out that a married Reed and Susan Storm features rarely in most of its (admittedly small number) of adaptations. In the comics, the wedding of Reed Richards and Susan Storm is a major event storyline, in 1965 but so far it’s the final scenes of the sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) which showed on-screen Reed and Susan’s marriage. The 2015 Fantastic Four film do not feature Reed and Susan in a relationship. In the comics, Franklin Richards and Valeria, their children, are major supporting characters, and yet none of them have appeared in any significant media adaptation. If the same standards applied to the Spider-Marriage are applied to Reed and Susan, then their marriage would have to be nullified as well.
The answer obviously is that eventually there might be a successful Fantastic Four movie. Certainly the upcoming film announced in the MCU directed by Jon Watts seems to be made with that intent. It’s likely this new version of Fantastic Four will feature the aspects of Fantastic Four that had hitherto been neglected but that would be a long-leash for characters who made their debut in 1961, and far greater and exclusive leeway than that extended to other characters and situations.
REFERENCES
- “Marvel Pushed Back on [SPOILER]’s Death in Spider-Man PS4 Game:. CBR. January 30, 2019.
https://www.cbr.com/marvel-comics-aunt-may-death-spider-man-ps4 - “Sony’s (Potential) Plans for Another ‘Spider-Man’ Reboot [Updated]”. Screenrant. Dec 14, 2014.
https://screenrant.com/sony-hacker-leak-adult-spider-man-reboot-kravens-last-hunt/
Elving's Musings 