Spider-Man Musical: 2 Steps Forward, 3 Steps Back

No one has had a chance to "break a leg" on Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, yet the musical continues to limp towards its opening.

We have been reporting almost weekly on the continued failures of the Spider-Man musical, Turn Off The Dark, to get off the ground, but that doesn’t mean that superstar music-writing team and VIPs Bono and The Edge from pretentious rock group U2 have given up on the project. The LA Times has the scoop on the opening of the movie:

As this Spider-Man tale opens, the audience sees New York City "on fire and in ruins" as "a section of the Brooklyn Bridge ascends with Mary Jane
bound and dangling helplessly from the bridge." Soon thereafter, a new
villainess called Arachne flies into the picture spinning her own
deadly trap, and as Spider-Man battles all kinds of criminals he’s
swinging right over the audience.

Sounds impressive, we suppose, but it turns out that theatergoers might never get the chance to see it, as the ambitious project has reached a budget of 52 million dollars, more than twice the cost of 2006’s Lord of the Rings musical, and yet has run into recent trouble with financial backers, sometimes announcing backers before they have signed on to the project. the team still needs to raise 24 million dollars to reach the proposed budget. The most foreboding potential disaster, however, is that if the project doesn’t open by April, not only will it miss the Tony Award eligibility that it is sure to be a shoe-in for, but the license from Marvel Entertainment will expire, making a Spider-Man musical difficult to produce.

This doesn’t bother U2’s Bono and the Edge, however:

"But who cares?" Bono said. "The visuals and the music are amazing, and that’s what will matter."

Ok then.

Still, the project has announced Reeve Carney asa teh actor who will play Peter Parker, joining Evan Rachel Wood as Mary Jane and Alan Cummings as The Green Goblin. The musical will focus on the relationship between high school students Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. We wish it good luck – this project is going to need it.

Source: LA Times

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Posted originally: 2009-11-08 21:31:46