It's an often remarked fact that we have had a lot of Spider-Man movies over the last few years. Kirsten Dunst has noticed this, and she's not happy. The actress who played Mary Jane Watson alongside Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker in Sam Raimi's trilogy of films between 2002 and 2007 is being quite critical of the fact that the wall-crawler is coming back to the big screen yet again. She doesn't feel that anything can top the films that they made, any attempt to do so is really just a naked cash grab. According to Dunst...
We made the best ones, so who cares? I'm like, 'You make it all you want.' They're just milking that cow for money. It's so obvious. You know what I mean?
Needless to say, Kirsten Dunst pulls no punches with her comments to Marie Claire. While this isn't the first time that she has compared her Spider-Man films favorably to any other adaptation, this is the first time that she has called out the motives of those making the new movie, accusing them of doing this simply for the money.
To be fair, money is absolutely one of the motives of those behind Spider-Man: Homecoming. Movie making is a business after all and while the art is important, if the art doesn't make money, then there isn't any money to make more art. Of course, that's why the character of Spider-Man was adapted into a film in 2002 to begin with, because he was a popular character that Sony believed would bring people into the theater. While it's true that there have been a lot of different Spider-Man movies over the last decade, they've also all been movies that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars, showing that people are always interested in seeing Spider-Man on the big screen. If the demand wasn't there people wouldn't be interested in risking the money.
It's also true that Kirsten Dunst was part of, what is so far, the two best Spider-Man movies released in theaters. There's an argument to be made that she was also in the worst Spider-Man movie but that's not important. The thing is, even if Spider-Man: Homecoming becomes the "best" Spider-Man movie in the eyes of the public, it still doesn't take anything away from the films directed by Sam Raimi. Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 will always be fantastic movies. They'll always deserve a large part of the credit for showing that movies based on comic books had potential as being not only financially successful but also be good movies at the same time. There's really no need to throw the shade.
We certainly hope that Spider-Man: Homecoming is good enough to be part of the conversation about which is the best Spider-Man movie, but at the end of the day we're just happy having as many good ones as we can possibly get.
