Willem Dafoe: Spider-Man reboot is a 'cynical approach to making money'
- ️@BenChildGeek
- ️Fri Oct 04 2013
Willem Dafoe has become the latest actor from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films to lay into the current reboot, calling it "a cynical approach to making money".
Dafoe, who appeared in 2002's Spider-Man as Norman Osborn, aka The Green Goblin, said Hollywood was telling the same story all over again with last year's The Amazing Spider-Man.
"I saw a trailer for the first Spider-Man reboot and I thought, 'This is crazy! It's not shot for shot, but it's the same story,'" Dafoe told Total Film. "I thought, 'This is sort of a cynical approach to making money!'"
Dafoe admitted he had not seen Marc Webb's movie, which stars Britain's Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man/Peter Parker, and was unlikely to do so. He praised Raimi's first film but admitted the trilogy, which culminated with 2007's poorly-received Spider-Man 3, failed to maintain its initial high standards.
"I like Spider-Man, the first one that I was involved in," said Dafoe. " Because although you can argue all sorts of things, from my perspective it was very pure.
"The way Sam Raimi approached it, it was pure in its intentions and I think he captured, particularly, Tobey [Maguire] at that particular moment. Then after that it became more difficult because it's hard to achieve that when it's gotten some kind of attention and a certain level of success."
Webb's Spider-Man reboot has previously been criticised by Dafoe's co-star James Franco, who made his name in Hollywood as Harry Osborn, Norman's son and heir to the Green Goblin persona. Writing in Vice magazine, he said the new film "arose even before there was time to bury the corpse of the old one and enshroud it in the haze of nostalgia".
Franco added: "I don't really feel much distress over it being remade, for many reasons, but what is interesting to me is that it has been remade so quickly. When great directors like Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan show that equally great characters can live within special-effects-laden films, then the comic-book genre becomes legitimised and great actors will follow. But the biggest reason, we cannot forget, is money."
The Amazing Spider-Man picked up decent reviews and performed well at the box office last year, though its $752m global haul was lower than for all previous films about the character. A sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, is due to debut in 2014 with Jamie Foxx and Paul Giamatti joining Garfield and Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy) as villains Electro and The Rhino.