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Byline: Sean Smith
Superheroes are not supposed to get fired. Sure, they quit now and then, but saving the world from evil forces would appear to be a pretty secure career choice since bad guys are never in short supply. So the call Tobey Maguire received from "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi last year must have come as a shock. The two men had not spoken for quite a while, communicating instead through agents, managers and studio executives. Raimi was deep in preproduction on "Spider-Man 2" and under pressure from Columbia Pictures to get the sequel on screens by summer 2004. The original shredded box-office records, grossing $820 million worldwide. Expectations were high, to say the least, and Raimi had reached the conclusion that his star would be unable to meet them. After much agonizing, he phoned Maguire. "Given this situation, I don't think we can make the picture with you," Raimi told him. "I have to hire somebody else."
On June 30, part two of the most successful comic-book movie in history, and the linchpin of what's likely to be a multi-billion-dollar franchise, will arrive in theaters. For a brief time in 2003, the future of that franchise--the entire weight of the "Spider-Man" juggernaut--balanced on the fragile spine of one 28-year-old actor. Maguire had suffered from recurrent back problems for years. As the "Spider-Man" sequel was gearing up, he was just coming off "Seabiscuit," a movie for which he'd had to lose a lot of weight and do a lot of horse riding, neither of which helped his condition. "My back was the worst it had ever been," he says. "I looked at the stunts I was going to have to do for 'Spider-Man 2,' which were going to be three times as difficult as the stunts on the first movie, and it became a little overwhelming." And that became an overwhelming problem. Soon, Maguire found himself fighting to hold on to his Spider-Man tights.
In Hollywood, records are made and broken almost every month, but when "Spider-Man" opened in May 2002, it racked up an astronomical $115 million in its opening weekend, a feat that no film to date, including the last installment of "The Lord of the Rings," "Shrek 2" or the third "Harry Potter," has managed to top. Much has been made of the fact that "Spider-Man" was the first post-9/11 blockbuster, and the conventional wisdom is that the film was a phenomenon because America needed heroes again. But maybe it's something more. To the rest of the world, the superhero symbol of the United States is Superman--broad shouldered, unconflicted, virtually indestructible. For decades, we've preferred to see ourselves that way, too. Spider-Man is none of those things. He's burdened by self-doubt. He wants to do...
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