Pajiba has posted excerpts of an interview with Sam Raimi from the latest episode of the Nerdist podcast. It turns out that Raimi agrees with critics of Spider-Man 3, a movie often derided for being overstuffed with villains, cringeworthy chemistry between Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire, and creepy emo Peter Parker. In an interview that also covered career low points like 1985’s Crimewave and the recent Oz: The Great And Powerful, Raimi explains how the third entry in his Spider-Man trilogy suffered from a lack of directorial love:
“It’s a movie that just didn’t work very well. I tried to make it work, but I didn’t really believe in all the characters, so that couldn’t be hidden from people who loved Spider-Man. If the director doesn’t love something, it’s wrong of them to make it when so many other people love it. I think [raising the stakes after Spider-Man 2] was the thinking going into it, and I think that’s what doomed us. I should’ve just stuck with the characters and the relationships and progressed them to the next step and not tried to top the bar.”
Raimi’s comments suggest that it wasn’t just studio pressure to raise the bar, but his own hubris to make it bigger and better that was part of the film’s undoing. While it’s hard to believe that Raimi’s comment that he “didn’t really believe in all the characters” could possibly extend to Topher Grace’s transcendent performance as Venom, the admission that the picture was “awful” may provide some small comfort to those still outraged seven years later. If not, there’s always the reviews section of Amazon.