I was having a conversation last week about superheroes and their arch-nemeses with a friend of mine on Twitter. My friend was wondering if Black Manta was Aquaman's arch-nemesis (I believe that he is). In truth, I can't name any of Aquaman's other enemies. I only know Black Manta because he was in the Legion of Doom on Superfriends (and is prominent in the currently-running Young Justice cartoon). Coincidentally, there was a story on IO9 this week suggesting that there are really only a handful of A-list superheroes. Charlie is probably right about that, though I think she significantly undersells Wonder Woman. In any event, I began thinking that there's a correlation. Is a deep and interesting rogues gallery the hallmark of an A-list superhero? It might be. Look at Batman: by the fifth big screen episode, without repeating ANY of the previous villains, they were still populating the movie with interesting villains (Ra's Al-Gul and The Scarecrow), and they still haven't exhausted them. The same thing can be said of Spider-Man. Even throwing them at the screen three at a time, as Spider-Man 3 did, did not exhaust them. And here we are in 2012 with a rebooted franchise and they've provided one of Spidey's major villains, one that hasn't been on screen before. Spidey, it seems, is on the A-List.
Like Batman Begins before it, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) grasps an essential fact about Spider-Man: so long as you stick to the basic origin (and don't do anything egregiously stupid like hire Joel Schumacher to direct your movie), you can perform all kinds of variations on the theme. The sheer volume of material you can work with from fifty years of Spider-man stories means that you can pick and choose all sorts of elements that don't match up with other interpretations while still hewing to the canon of the character, and while still making a movie that's recognizably about the same character. This movie doesn't much resemble the Raimi movies (much), but it's still Spider-man. This is a neat trick.
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