Even though it came out the year before, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to broadly describe Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 as the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of the superhero genre.
Tobey Maguire’s third outing under the spandex, much like Harrison Ford’s fourth crack of the whip, was the latest installment in a classic and universally-beloved franchise, one that generated so much hype in the buildup to release that it could justifiably be called one of the most hotly-anticipated movies of all-time.
Sure enough, it would go on to earn a ton of money at the box office, reigning as the highest-grossing Spider-Man adventure ever until the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Far From Home, but it left fans feeling more tepid on the inside than warm and fuzzy.
It isn’t terrible, and there’s plenty to love, but the grubby fingerprints of studio interference were all over it. As tends to be the case with almost any high-profile legacy title that didn’t live up to expectations initially, a Twitter campaign has been launched to #ReleaseTheRaimiCut.
Does such a thing even exist? Or are these just additional deleted scenes that didn’t make their way onto a home video release. Raimi has never even hinted so much as hinted that he’s got a preferred version tucked up his sleeve, so this could be just the latest online petition to accomplish absolutely nothing in the long run.