Can anyone avoid getting caught in the web of Spider-Man 3 this weekend?
If you don’t actually go see the film yourself, you can’t help but be exposed to its hefty marketing - some toy, commercial or cereal box plastered with Spidey’s likeness. And you can hardly read anything printed recently that doesn’t include the facts that the film set a new record for advance ticket sales back on April 23rd, or that it’s the widest release of all time (4,252 theaters, topping the previous record holder, Shrek 2, which opened in 4,223 theaters).
There’s also a lot of press on the beefy bucks behind the film, since this is probably the most expensive movie ever made. Some sources estimate the total bill, with marketing and promotion added in, could well add up to a whopping $500 million. Sony denies that last figure of course. It was based on $350 million production costs, plus about $150 million for marketing. The “official” studio figures place it in the $250-270 million production budget range, but that’s still a lot of cash. Besides, the studio has made a more-than-healthy $1.6 billion off the previous two, so who’s counting?
Thomas Haden Church who plays the new, sympathetic villain Sandman, is certainly counting his personal investment in the film. He told me he committed close to two years of his life to the project, first getting in shape for it, then filming. He was a bit under-the-weather when he chatted with FilmStew, having just come back from promoting the film in Japan, and getting what he thought was food poisoning.
“It’s weird, because I haven’t been sick in two years, but I’ve been sick twice this week,” he explains, going on to elaborate on the fact that he would be going to London the next day, then all over Europe including Russia, then back to New York after the Paris premiere. But for a blockbuster like Spider-Man 3, he insists it’s all worth it. “I was flattered when they asked me to play it,” he says. “That they thought I was ‘The Guy.’ These roles are fairly sought after by anyone that could, by any stretch of the imagination, fit in. I was overwhelmed.”
Because of that, he gave it his all. Director Sam Raimi later told me that he’d wanted to work with Haden Church for quite some time, and his Academy Award nomination for Sideways opened the door for Raimi to cast him. “Thomas Haden Church was a guy I’d tried to work with in the past on a film called The Gift,” Raimi recalls. “But the producer wouldn’t allow me to cast him at that time, so I had to sadly say goodbye to him.”
“But then I saw him in Sideways, and he was so brilliant, so funny and sensitive and so human, and those are the qualities that I really needed in our villain,” Raimi continues. “He created so much humanity in that role that when he was suggested to me by [producers] Laura Ziskin and Avi Arad, I thought it was a great idea.”
Haden Church took the role very seriously, and his dedication showed in the film. I couldn’t help but observe that the man was as buff as any 300 cast member. “I think I trained for eight or nine months before we started shooting,” he told me, blushing a little at my compliment (or was that the food poisoning?) “And then, my filming in the movie spanned about 16 months, so my physical training came in right about two years, from start to finish. I also had a nutritionist, and a phalanx of doctors giving me metabolic analysis, doing blood work and physicals - it was pretty involved. Very, very stringent in focus.”
I wish the film could have been a little more stringent in focus, or, like Haden Church, a little tighter. I think two-and-a half villains made it feel a bit bloated, and took away from the fact Haden Church’s story arch is one of the most interesting, and historical, in Spider-Man history. But I guess when you invest that much money in something, you have to have something to show for it. And Spiderman 3 is indeed a show.
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