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He’s directing the Doctor Strange sequel – but will the Raimi we get be the indie-horror enfant terrible we want or the Spider-Man 3 dud we don’t?
Thirteen years ago, as Sam Raimi wrapped production on Spider-Man 3, few would have imagined that it would not be until 2020 that the director of The Evil Dead stepped behind the cameras on another superhero movie. But that is exactly where Raimi finds himself after confirming his involvement this week in the Marvel sequel Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. What’s even more remarkable is that this will only be the film-maker’s third new movie since the ill-fated Spidey threequel that saw Tobey Maguire’s run as the masked wall-crawler come to an unceremonious halt.
Spider-Man 3, as has been well-documented, was a giant egg of a movie, a film reportedly ruined by Sony’s insistence on incorporating the fan-favourite alien symbiote storyline into an episode that already had James Franco’s New Goblin and Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman as major villains. Raimi certainly didn’t help with those god-awful scenes in which Peter Parker is transformed into an arrogant emo youth following his interaction with the symbiote. But was the movie really so bad that the director deserved the best part of a decade and a half in Hollywood purgatory? This, after all, was the same film-maker whose earlier Spidey instalments broke all box-office records for superhero movies and won rapturous critical praise only a few years earlier. Continue reading...