Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

[Danny Franks]

This discussion highlights one of the problems with comics being translated to the big screen - honouring canon. 

I don't consider Zendaya's character to be the Mary Jane Watson that I used to read in the comics. She's not. She's completely different. She's a new character and that's fine by me. Why bother doing MJ again? Why bother doing Gwen again? Previous movies did those characters already, with varying degrees of success. Giving her that name was probably a bad idea, because it caused this level of confusion, but I agree that it was just a nod to the comic book character and a twist to let the audience know that she was going to be important to Peter.

This entire Spider-Man franchise is a departure from the comics, and it's been refreshing for that. We get Peter, we get Aunt May and we get some villains, and everything else has been fair game for reinterpretation. I think it's cool that Marvel were willing to be a little daring and creative in a way that Sony had proved incapable of in their previous versions of the character.

They skipped his origin completely. They barely mention Uncle Ben or Peter's tragic parents. They give him Tony Stark as a mentor right off the bat. They put him in the Avengers as a teenager (Spider-Man was famously never an Avenger until Brian Michael Bendis got to write the book in the mid-2000s). They make him the heir to Stark Enterprises. They completely reinterpret his rogues gallery - Vulture and Mysterio were both very different from their comic book origins. And, last but not least, they reveal his identity (something Marvel comics only did with Civil War, then undid later).

[Kel Varnsen]

32 minutes ago, Danny Franks said:

don't consider Zendaya's character to be the Mary Jane Watson that I used to read in the comics. She's not. She's completely different. She's a new character and that's fine by me. Why bother doing MJ again? Why bother doing Gwen again? Previous movies did those characters already, with varying degrees of success. Giving her that name was probably a bad idea, because it caused this level of confusion, but I agree that it was just a nod to the comic book character and a twist to let the audience know that she was going to be important to Peter.

That is sort of where I am at, she is a new character. Peter in the MCU also doesn't have a close friend named Harry. It doesn't matter to me as long as the stories are good. Although I would find it a hilarious level of trolling if the Spiderman writers decided that her character's name was Michelle June (MJ) Stacey.

[Lantern7]

Compilation of Robot Chicken sketches. I cued it to a bit goofing on Nick Fury’s entrance in NWH.