Spider-man: Are superheroes losing their edge?

Characters with incredible powers have been flying or racing to the rescue of mankind since the Thirties, says Tim Martin, but they face a tougher challenge battling to evolve and stay relevant for a tech-savvy 21st-century audience

It is not too far-fetched to predict,” remarked Superman’s co-creator Joe Shuster in the first issue of the comic named after him, “that some day our very own plane may be peopled entirely by SUPERMEN!”

Seventy-three years later, anyone who has visited a multiplex cinema, browsed in a toyshop or read the culture section of a newspaper may well respond with a hollow laugh to this prophecy from 1939. It’s been years now since the original superheroes leapt in a single bound from their two dimensional comics ghetto. Today, they flex and grimace in the dead centre of popular entertainment: on the big screen, on the small screen, on your Xbox, on your bookshelves, everywhere.

As flies to wanton boys are global box office records to these spandex demigods. This summer alone, Joss Whedon’s Avengers Assemble has swallowed £906 million in cinema ticket sales in only two months, becoming the third-highest grossing film of all time. Commercial anticipation is already high for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the final instalment in his Batman trilogy, poised to swoop on leathern wings into the final week of July.

And this month, somewhat in the shadow of those two titans, comes The Amazing Spider-Man, which reboots the story of one of the superhero pantheon’s most durable heroes on the 50th anniversary of his creation, but which has a bare fortnight to claim the attention of audiences before Batman returns.

But wait a minute, even the most dedicated superjunkie might ask: surely we’ve been here before? After all, it’s only five years since the veteran director Sam Raimi concluded his own trilogy of Spider-Man films, while less than a decade divided the final episode in Joel Schumacher’s woeful, high-camp Batman series from Nolan’s grim, terror-age reinterpretation in 2005. The unfortunate Hulk, meanwhile, suffered two equally underwhelming cinematic resets in 2003 and 2008 before finding his feet in the Avengers film.