Columbia Pictures
Seems like our favorite neighborhood webslinger has found himself in a sticky situation.
There's no shortage of buzz for the highly anticipated The Amazing Spider-Man, which hits theaters on July 3. But is the reboot's prerelease promo blitz swinging way out of control?
Sure looks like it, judging from a 25-minute—yep, 25-minute—supercut of scenes from the flick that one overzealous fan cobbled together from all the existing footage out in the wild.
Is the flick in danger of overexposure? And is there such a thing, really, as TMI in today's Twitter-savvy, spoilerrific, media-saturated times?
"Spider-Man is such an interesting property because it's a reboot in less than five years," says Exhibitor Relations box-office analyst Jeff Bock, "something that this generation already saw three of them come out."
Indeed, the property is arguably Marvel's second most valuable franchise, next to the $1.44 billion–grossing (and counting) The Avengers. Which means, the stakes are higher to get Spidey to overcome doubters who think this reboot may have come too soon.
The Amazing Spider-Man's massive media blitz, then, can be seen as a function of necessity, rather than desperation, given today's saturated blockbuster market.
"Honestly, for a film that has to hit every demographic, that's what you have to do these days," says Bock. "You just have to oversaturate, overexpose and make people say, 'OK, I'll see it to get it out of my head. I just gotta go see this thing.'"
Adds Hollywood.com box-office president Paul Dergarabedian, "With summer blockbusters, I don't think that you can get too much prerelease exposure." He says he doesn't believe that there's such a thing as "too much awareness," noting that "I don't think a studio would turn down any awareness for the film. So is overexposure possible? In my mind, not for a summer blockbuster."
On the contrary, overexposure seems to be what hardcore fans are clamoring for these days.
"That's why we have Comic-Con," offers Bock. "They expect studios to launch ad campaigns for films that are one to two years out already. And that's what audiences expect nowadays. That's part of the hype machine."
That hype machine, however, can cut both ways. Sure The Amazing Spider-Man's media onslaught began well over a year ahead of its release, as did those of The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. But for every The Avengers, you get a clunker like John Carter or Battleship—flicks whose overexposure, and negative buzz, eventually sank them.
"John Carter is a good example," says Dergarabedian, "but the overexposure manifested itself in all this talk about the budget"—which reportedly ballooned to over $250 million. "And Battleship was the same thing—they've been getting overexposure about negative aspects of the movie, and that's never good."
The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb, for one, sees the media blitz as par for the course for a beloved superhero that audiences can't get enough of.
"Yeah, that's really the marketing of the film," Webb tells E! News exclusively. "I think everybody wants a piece of exclusive footage…in the day of the Internet."
The director, who cracked that he plans to take a long post-Spidey vacation at "a beach somewhere, have a glass of whiskey and watch the sun stroll across the sky," also tells us that fans who complain about Spider-Man overload should just switch off the TV.
Still, the best kind of publicity is always good publicity, and the one thing that The Amazing Spider-Man has going for it is that it's actually shaping up to be a critical hit.
Reviews have so far been across-the-board ecstatic, with critics praising director Webb for his darker, fresher take on the material, and for Andrew Garfield's brooding, angsty performance.
That, coupled with the flick's all-out media blitz, should ensure that fans' Spidey senses will indeed keep tingling, regardless of how much prerelease footage continues to swing in.