With Marvel sweeping in box office hit after
box office hit, it seems that everyone and their backyard sound stage want to
get in on this ‘shared film universe’ trend. Sure, Marvel didn’t exactly invent
the idea; filmmakers like John Hughes and Kevin Smith both filled in their
films with little threads that tied them together for those willing to pay
attention. However, those guys did it more in passing than anything else,
whereas Marvel has officially turned it into a new blossoming branch of the
Hollywood franchise system. From
DC’s attempts to match their graphic novel rivals to Legendary Studio’s
increasingly-promising big monster franchise, even individuals like M.
Night Shyamalan who seems to be setting up his own comic book-inspired world
off the back of
Split, this is basically the big new thing in Hollywood right
now.
So, naturally, it seems that Universal Pictures wants to get in on this
trend as well, using today’s film as a springboard for a shared universe based
on their classic cavalcade of movie monsters. Of course, if the rest of the
entries in the Dark Universe series are anything resembling this, we may be in
for a very bumpy ride over the next
several years because this film is something truly special.
This doesn’t look like any other Spider-Man film. Hell, this
doesn’t look like any other comic book movie. The reason why, though, is kind
of strange: It actually looks like a comic book. Bent around the frame of Sony
Animation at its high-energy, thought bubbles, onomatopoeic sound effects, even
half-tone dots that show in a lot of older comic strips populate the landscape,
giving this a tangible connection to the medium that birthed it.
