I don’t envy any movie executive or creators who are tasked with both pleasing fans who want absolute fidelity to the source material and devotees who are happy to see new takes on their favorite characters. Fanboys are willing to endure some creative liberties, but not so much that it ruins whatever vision of the superhero or their world they have in their head. It’s a science with ever-changing rules, which brings us to “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” a film that apparently has some fans very confused/concerned.
The trailers for the movie have revealed that the best friend of Tom Holland‘s Peter Parker is Ned Leeds, played by Jacob Batalon. However, his appearance is more akin to Ganke, the best friend of the other Spidey, Miles Morales. Oh no! Forty years of darkness! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
Okay, so maybe to the layperson this is hardly an issue. However, Brian Michael Bendis, who created Ganke, is certainly puzzled by all this.
“I’ll be very honest right now. I have not talked about this publicly, but it feels very bizarre. Most of the time the characters that I’ve had a hand in creating that have made it to the screen, from Jessica [Jones] all the way to Maria Hill and Quake, the level of quality of the adaptation and care in which they bring the character forward past the adaptation into its new life has been uniformly amazing — my luck in this area has been second to none,” he told Ultimate Spin podcast.
“I’ve not seen ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming,’ so I’m gonna wait until we see what we see. But, yeah, it was bizarre and flattering. I don’t even know if Ganke was the inspiration, or they just got to their own place with a character like this on their own. I don’t know. It does seem like it might have been, but no one’s told me either way. There’s so much else in that trailer that’s from ‘Ultimate Spider-Man’ that I would assume that, yes, it is… It’s weird only because Ganke wasn’t part of Peter’s story—he was part of Miles’ story,” he added.
Again, I’m not really seeing the issue here. It seems director Jon Watts and co. maybe mixed and matched a bit, but….so? Seems like it’s one of those no win situations for the filmmakers, but we’ll let fans duke it out in the comments section.
“Spider-Man: Homecoming” opens on July 7th. Listen to the full talk with Bendis below. [via io9]
