With Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to the hugely successful The Dark Knight and Marvel’s unprecedented live action team-up of their biggest names, The Avengers, both hitting theaters this summer, The Amazing Spider-Man has started to feel like the odd man out. Clearly Spider-Man is one of the most popular superheroes of all time, but enough time just hasn’t passed between his last big screen trilogy and this franchise relaunch to build a level of anticipation and excitement for the film comparable to these other big, comic book-based events.
That hasn’t stopped the marketing team from doing their damnedest to sell this movie to a superhero-saturated audience, however. This might not be the summer of Spider-Man when all is said and done, but it’s undeniable how cool all of the recent advertising for the film has been. The recent additions to the marketing blitz are a new, Japanese trailer that takes, mostly, the same footage from the second trailer, but remixes it to produce a much darker tone and sense of dread, and a couple of new posters that look standard at first glance, but might tell us a bit about where this story is going with closer consideration.
The new trailer, via Inside Movies, promises that this will be a story full of pain, secrets, and regret. The rivalry that develops between Spider-Man and Dr. Connors is played as being much more personal and explosively violent than it’s looked in the past. And there’s even some new footage of Peter all beat up and injured after a particularly taxing day as Spider-Man, complete with a glimpse of Sally Field showing some concern as Aunt May.
While the spectacle of these trailers all seems to be roughly on par with what Sam Raimi was doing toward the end of his Spider-Man trilogy, it looks like the most apparent difference between that take on the character and this one is that this time the acting is all quite a bit better, across the board. And while there’s little that could be done to make this movie look as appealing as The Dark Knight Rises or The Avengers at this point, every new bit of footage that comes out paints it as anything but the unwelcome cash grab it was originally received as.
The second bit of promotion that’s new to the world are two new posters that have hit the web via Yahoo! Movies. One is a pretty standard, yet dynamic shot of Spidey stuck to a building and hitting an action pose, but the other seems to tie in thematically with the Japanese trailer pretty well.
Spider-Man is looking down, perhaps out of shame or failure, and he has some deep gashes from the Lizard’s claws visible across his heart. The message seems to be that nobody is coming out of this story unscathed. Great actors, big stakes, personal storytelling…what more could we possibly want from a Spider-Man movie? This project’s timing might not be right, but it’s becoming increasingly clearer that its approach is spot on.
The Amazing Spider-Man opens on July 3.