'Spider-Man' spins a new web

With great box office comes great responsibility -- and after director Sam Raimi's three "Spider-Man" movies grossed nearly $2.5 billion, the filmmakers behind the reboot "The Amazing Spider-Man," which opened Tuesday, had a responsibility to keep web-spinning pulp into gold.

Beyond that, they say, they felt a responsibility to the Marvel superhero whose 50-year canon attests to his relevance and adaptability. As filmmakers also say, there are countless Spider-Man stories to tell.

So the unavoidable question becomes: Then why not tell a new one instead of an origin-story reboot?

"I think there are new stories in this fourth film," director Marc Webb said. "There's [the story of] Peter Parker's parents, there's the Gwen Stacy saga, and then there's the Lizard," the supervillain bedeviling Peter's heroic alter ego. "I think all of those are new stories and new things to explore."

They're also more youthful things to explore, which might be the bigger point. "The Amazing Spider-Man" -- starring Andrew Garfield as Peter, Emma Stone as love interest Gwen and Rhys Ifans as scientist Dr. Curt Connors, aka the bestial Lizard -- skews younger than the 2002 original, which starred Tobey Maguire. While that earlier film begins with Peter in high school, he soon graduates, moves in with his college roommate and gets a job. "Amazing" begins and ends in high school, with all of its attendant concerns.

"'Spider-Man' has always been about a boy who was in high school, who was approaching manhood," said Matt Tolmach, the film's producer with Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin. "And the further you get from that in your storytelling, the more you lose some of the real metaphor of what the comic was always about" -- although, to be fair to the comic books' many writers over the years, Peter graduated high school in a 1965 story and finished college in 1978. Spider-Man has been in his spider-manhood for quite a while now.

But a movie or even a movie trilogy is different from comics -- and it's not as though talented writers didn't try to tell "Spider-Man 4." Starting in 2007, when Raimi was announced to direct the planned 2011 release, no less than James Vanderbilt ("Zodiac"), David Lindsay-Abaire (the Pulitzer-winning play "Rabbit Hole") and Gary Ross ("The Hunger Games") worked on iterations of the script. The process had even progressed as far as the producers approaching John Malkovich to play the supervillain. (The producers won't confirm which villain, although Tolmach says, "You can probably figure it out if you go on the Internet," where Movieline.com reported it was the Vulture.)

They eventually figured it out.

"I'll tell you what was not working," Arad said. "At the end of the day was always the same question: So where is Peter in all of it?"

Without a satisfactory script, plus a post-"Avatar" decree that the film be in 3-D, Raimi voiced concern about meeting the release date.

Finally, Arad said, "We all decided to pay homage to the franchise by saying, 'Let's not just milk it'" and make a sequel for a sequel's sake. "The creative integrity of not making Movie 4 cost everyone who made that decision a fortune."

Eight days after the studio announced Raimi's exit and that the next film would be a reboot, "(500) Days of Summer" director Webb was aboard. At that stage, Webb said, "There was a script that Jamie had written, and I worked with Jamie for a while, and then I worked with [two-time Oscar winner] Alvin for a little bit. Jamie was in and out the entire time." Steve Kloves, who wrote all but one of the "Harry Potter" films, did a polish, particularly of the teenage characters' scenes.

"I love Spider-Man, because I felt like Peter Parker when I was a kid," said the American-born, U.K.-raised, classically trained actor best known for "The Social Network."

Although he was a gymnast who competed nationally at 12, "I also felt like I was too skinny to be athletic," Garfield said. "I was good at sports, but I would get concussed all the time playing rugby."

He understood Peter's combination of vulnerability and resilience. In fact, he felt that firsthand after getting the role.

"I had a split-second where I was so happy," he said. "And then when you start really working on it, you go, 'This is such responsibility! I don't know if I can handle it. I love this so much, and I don't want to disappoint myself as a fan, I don't want to disappoint other fans.' And then you don't sleep, and then you're losing weight."