Can Marvel help Spider-Man's Sam Raimi escape from Hollywood purgatory?
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 welldocumented, 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 boxoffice records for superhero movies and won rapturous critical praise only a few years earlier.
Since 2007, Raimi has directed only the uproarious Drag Me to Hell, a comic horror nod to his groundbreaking earlier work on Evil Dead II, and the middling fantasy Oz the Great and Powerful, in which he reunited with Franco. Both movies made money and neither is considered a turkey, though the latter film drew only lukewarm reviews.
Still, it is surprising that a studio such as Marvel has not made better use of Raimi’s prodigious talents at an earlier stage.
Whether the film-maker can restore his star to the gilded firmament where it rested at the turn of the century remains to be seen. This is a director who moved from indie-horror enfant terrible to blockbuster big cheese with consummate ease on the early SpiderMan
films, but has since struggled with the demands of working within the studio system. After Drag Me to Hell led critics to observe that he was back to his best, Raimi observed that he had enjoyed working again “with a tight team doing the main jobs”, as opposed to the Spider-Man films where “you come to rely on a lot of people doing things for you and a lot of help”. He added: “It’s refreshing and wonderful to be reminded that, as with most film-makers, the best way to do it is yourself.”
And yet, the Spider-Man movies are unmistakably Raimi-esque in a way in which Oz the Great and Powerful is not, with the film-maker’s trademark lightning-quick edits, delight in unusual perspectives and fondness for looming, ominous shadows. Such gothic intensity was almost completely absent from the Disney fantasy, as Raimi seemed to shrink into himself creatively under the weight of the mouse house’s corporate oversight.
Marvel has not always been the most comfortable home for maverick film-makers, but it is to be hoped that the studio has picked the perfect vehicle for Raimi to return to superhero flicks. You don’t get any more far-out and psychedelic than 2016’s Doctor Strange, even if that movie’s director, Scott Derrickson, reportedly walked away from the sequel because he wanted it to be more of a horror film than Marvel had envisaged.
If the studio can harness all Raimi’s early vigour, his delight in eye-popping visual tomfoolery and his almost unique ability to make the camera itself the most important character, then we ought to be looking at a future classic of the genre. If the Raimi that emerges here is the seemingly restrained director that gave us Oz the Great and Powerful, the results might be less encouraging.
There are reasons to be hopeful. Raimi’s Spider-Man films, with their breezy, primary-coloured insouciance, were in many ways the blueprint that Marvel has been following ever since, and one can’t help thinking that their director is finally in his rightful place. The prodigal son has come home.