Actor and writer James Franco recently wrote a critique of "Man of Steel" for Vice, but much of the attention he's received from his article is based on his commentary on Spider-Man, not Superman, according to The Wrap.
Franco attended the "Man of Steel" premiere incognito because he feels that actor Henry Cavill doesn't like him, and wrote that while overall he enjoyed the film, he had less praise for "The Amazing Spider-Man." He wrote that the 2012 film, the fourth installment in the Spider-Man series, is essentially a quick reboot of his own Spider-Man trilogy, which he starred in as Harry Osborn with Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.
"I don't have a huge emotional attachment to the Spider-Man franchise as a subject," Franco wrote. "My biggest sentimental ties are to the people I worked with on those films: Sam, Toby, Kirsten [Dunst], the late and great Laura Ziskin, and the hundreds of others who worked with us. I don't really feel much distress over its being remade, for many reasons, but what is interesting to me is that it has been remade so quickly-and the reasons why."
He critiqued the current Spider-Man series as being something that "arose even before there was time to bury the corpse of the old one and enshroud it in the haze of nostalgia." The trilogy he starred in premiered in 2002, with the final part of the series opening in 2007. The sequel to "The Amazing Spider-Man" is set for release in 2014, and stars Emma Stone and Jamie Foxx.
As for the reason the series is being remade, Franco chalked it up to money. "The answer is, of course, money," he wrote. "We are in the film business, and the studios are owned by large corporations who want to make money. And in this art form, where so much is spent and so much profit can be made, one criterion for success is inevitably the financial. And when movies become so big that they can make $200 million in one weekend like 'The Avengers' did, everyone from studios to filmmakers are going to want to get in on making comic-book movies. "
Marvel recently announced the third and fourth installments of "The Amazing-Spiderman," as the first was a blockbuster, earning $262,030,663 at the box office in North America, and a total of $752,216,557 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
