Do you think Spiderman 3 gets a bad rap? I can see some of the criticisms, with Venom and the cluttered cast of villains, but for the most part I still felt there was a lot of solid stuff in it and was a pretty good movie. Like with the infamous black suit scenes, I don’t feel like Peter was *supposed* to look cool, but it was what he as a nerdy kid would perceive as cool, which is to say “not very.” So how do you feel about it, or the Raimi films in general?

I don’t like Spiderman 3; I like Spiderman 1 + 2. 

As for the black suit, I think the “cool” or “not” thing misses the point – in the comic, the suit doesn’t change Spiderman’s mind beyond making him tired and a bit snappish b/c his body is fighting crime while he’s asleep. The suit is more useful (it can mimic street clothes, it produces its own webbing, and it responds to his thoughts) and it has new vulnerabilities (fire and sound) but only Black Cat thinks it’s cool (Mary Jane hates it, for example). It’s not a Jekyll and Hyde story.

Rather, the plot dynamic is about the suit as an obsessive lover – that it cares for him and wants to help him so much that it begins to act on its own and eventually tries to permanently bond with him against his will, and then reacts to Peter’s rejection by developing an obsessive love-hate relationship as Venom. 

But the problem with Spiderman 3 is that it tries to do too many stories: it’s about Venom and Eddie Brock, it’s about Sandman and retconning him into the Uncle Ben story, it’s about Harry as the Green Goblin, it’s about Mary Jane vs. Gwen Stacy, and on and on. One of the things that Homecoming showed is that you can have multiple villains – it’s got the Vulture, the Tinkerer, the Shocker, the Scorpion, and the Prowler – but you need to make them part of one story, in this case the Vulture’s story.