From the beginning the deck was stacked against Spider-Man 3.
Its predecessor was not only a perfect Spider-Man film, but is still to this day the most perfect superhero movie ever made. A film whose legacy looms large over the entire genre in a way that no other movie has since Richard Donner’s Superman. But even beyond the unfathomably high bar set by Spider-Man 2, this film was plagued by behind-the-scenes turmoil with a studio and a filmmaker essentially working against each other to craft two very different stories that were tonally and thematically at odds. There was no way that could produce a fully coherent film, let alone one that can hold a candle to the masterwork of Raimi’s Spider-Man 2. However, when the dust settled and this conflicted Frankenstein’s monster of a movie was released into theaters, the result was messy, compromised, and deeply flawed, but not entirely bad. Not exactly good, but better than its reputation and, likely, your own memory suggest.
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David Daut 