Will The Amazing Spider-Man Be Too Similar to Batman Reboot?

The Amazing Spider-Man trailer painted a clear picture of how next year's reboot will go. However, that picture looks very familiar to many comic book fans. One of the common reactions to the trailer was that it seemed to turn Peter Parker into Batman, or at least the darker, more serious version of Batman from Christopher Nolan's universe. But will that make Spider-Man amazing again, or just wind up being an unnecessary change in tone?

The entire idea of a reboot is still largely questionable since the original franchise started 10 years ago and was soaring until a few years ago. But with just one critically panned sequel in Spider-Man 3 and a failure to agree on making Spider-Man 4 with Sam Raimi, Sony Pictures is going back to the well and distancing itself completely from Raimi's vision.

The first teaser seemed to turn Peter into more of a brooding outcast than usual, with more focus on the loss of his parents and not his Uncle Ben. But taking a more serious approach to a comic book hero in the first installment of a reboot franchise isn't exactly a new idea. Nolan used that same formula with Batman Begins, but not everyone can be Nolan and not every superhero can be Batman.

Even in his darker moments, Peter Parker is hardly the tortured soul that Bruce Wayne is. In fact, when Raimi tried to make him more evil and corrupted in Spider-Man 3, it became a franchise-killing plot twist. But that may have been because Raimi's ideas to make Peter more of a blackened soul included a slightly different hairstyle and John Travolta-esque dance moves.

When the Batman series was revived, it had to erase the disaster of Joel Schumacher's installments, which almost killed the comic book movie genre as a whole. Yet Spider-Man 3 was not the disaster that Batman & Robin was, especially considering how much fans loved the first two films.

Except for that one black mark, the original franchise was a huge success, both with box office and critics. Therefore, a radical reinvention may not be necessary just because of one disappointing film. It was very necessary to make Batman respectable again, but he was more amenable to darker and more serious examination.

Right when the trailer leaked, Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb told the LA Times that he wanted to focus on Peter as "an outcast in a contemporary context." But to modern day comic book movie fans, that context seems to remind them more of Batman, and maybe even of Twilight's "emo" vampires, which would be even worse.

Can a more serious and troubled Spider-Man/Peter Parker work without being campy or derivative? Fanatics will get a better idea at the film's Comic-Con panel Friday and in successive trailers for the next year until the amazing/depressed web slinger officially returns July 3, 2012.

Sources

Los Angeles Times- "Spider-Man director Marc Webb feels a 'responsibility to reinvent' the hero"