Stan Lee’s reaction to Sam Raimi CGI Spider-Man has almost made a producer scream

It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when making a superhero film was considered a big bet. Yes, we had “Batman” by Tim Burton and “Superman” by Richard Donn, but after the films of Joel Schumacher’s Batman became a laughing stock, the genre seemed dead in the water.

Enter: Sam Raimi. The horror director had already made a name for himself as a author of Gonzo behind the films “Evil Dead”, with a penchant to launch the camera in the air at incredible speeds while jumping between humor and horror like an Olympic athlete. So when Sony Pictures brought him to the edge to bring Spider-Man to the silver screen for the very first time, no one was certain that it was going to work.

Among those who were skeptical were Stan Lee, the man whose name is synonymous with Marvel comics. Lee’s approval was a critical test of the film’s viability. If Lee did not like what he had seen, they would have no chance with real fans, and producer Avi Arad shared a hilarious anecdote on Lee’s reaction to see CGI of “Spider-Man” for the first time that almost made him cry.

Nowadays, the mechanics of setting up heavy visual effects is well known: the director will take the script and work with the team of visual effects to assemble an approximate version of the scene which includes rudimentary visual effects to give an idea of ​​what it will look like before going through the laborious practice of rendering all the action.

The revision of these “pre-visualization” cups of the film is a crucial part of the process because all the data notes can be more easily discussed before the visual effect team begins to get your hands dirty, and therefore the producer Avi Arad has made sure to share this early cut of the film with Stan Lee. Unfortunately for Arad, he had not managed to prepare Lee for what he was going to see, which led to a hilarious moment that Arad called “one of the greatest moments” to make the film:

“”[I] showed Stan Lee for the first time the CGI of Spider-Man flying. I look at him and he was like an uncle, you know? And he whispers in my ear: “Is that it?” And then I realized that he did not know that it is pre-viz. It was new in the technological side of things. He was so disappointed! I almost cried! “”

Stan Lee was already an old man when “Spider-Man” came into production, and the visual effects process was still in its infancy in the year 2000, so it is not a surprise that Stan Lee did not realize that it was just an approximate cup for what the film would look like. Fortunately for the team behind “Spider-Man”, they were able to convince Lee that everything would work:

“I said,” Stan, the world has never seen anything like it. “” Yeah, but it doesn’t seem cool. “I said to him,” Don’t worry. Anyway, when he saw him, he had a lot of tears in his eyes, because he is his baby. “

The rest is, as they say, history. “Spider-Man” has become the greatest superhero film of all time, thanks in part to its revolutionary visual effects that, as Arad had described, the world had never seen before. And although Lee may never have realized his dream of playing the greatest with the greatest hateful of Spider-Man, J. Jonah Jameson, at least Raimi and the company were able to give his baby the successful treatment he deserved.