James Franco was not necessarily a fan of "The Amazing Spider-Man." In a new piece for Vice, Franco -- who played Harry Osborn in three "Spider-Man" films for director Sam Raimi -- wrote that the 2012 Spider-Man reboot was made "before there was time to bury the corpse of the old one and enshroud it in the haze of nostalgia."
The knock comes as part of Franco's review of "Man of Steel." "I don't have a huge emotional attachment to the Spider-Man franchise as a subject," Franco wrote. "[My] biggest sentimental ties are to the people I worked with on those films: Sam, Toby [Maguire], Kirsten [Dunst], the late and great Laura Ziskin, and the hundreds of others who worked with us. I don’t really feel much distress over its being remade, for many reasons, but what is interesting to me is that it has been remade so quickly -- and the reasons why."
The reason "The Amazing Spider-Man" exists, according to Franco, is money.
"We are in the film business, and the studios are owned by large corporations who want to make money. And in this art form, where so much is spent and so much profit can be made, one criterion for success is inevitably the financial. And when movies become so big that they can make $200 million in one weekend like 'The Avengers' did, everyone from studios to filmmakers are going to want to get in on making comic-book movies. And 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 legitimized and great actors will follow. But the biggest reason, we cannot forget, is money.
This isn't the first time Franco has commented on "The Amazing Spider-Man." In an interview with MTV earlier this year, Franco said his reaction to the film was, "Eh."
"I mean, they could have strayed a little bit more from the original," Franco said. "It's like, 'Why?' Well, I guess they made a lot of money. Congrats. Good for them. Sam and I moved on, we made 'Oz The Great And Powerful.'"
For his part, Raimi only had kind things to say about "The Amazing Spider-Man" in the press.
"It was very hard for me to see the new Spider-Man movie, I felt so attached to it, I couldn’t see Spider-Man with another director; it’s like my love, and I didn’t want to walk in on my love with someone else. It was just like that," Raimi told the blog Hey U Guys. "Then I got over myself last week and said, 'Just see the damn thing.' And I did, and I loved it. I actually felt free. I thought, 'Why am I carrying around this baggage?' Of course the next Spider-Man story should be told, and [Marc Webb] did a wonderful job telling that. I loved the movie, and I'm looking forward like a fan to the next installment."
Raimi has plenty of Spider-Man to look forward to: "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" is out in theaters on May 2, 2014, while "The Amazing Spider-Man 3" and "The Amazing Spider-Man 4" were both announced this week with releases eyed for 2016 and 2018. As FilmDrunk noted, "Amazing Spider-Man" star Andrew Garfield will be 35 by the time "Spider-Man 4" is out in theaters.
For more from Franco, including why "Man of Steel" star Henry Cavill may not be his biggest fan, hit Vice.
