Controversial Spider-Man Opinions

[SpiderClops]

Yes. Yes, it is. She was not the main character nor was she an established Hollywood big name actress. Plain and simple. She had couple of successes but by no means she was a "star".

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Yes. Yes, it is. She was not the main character nor was she an established Hollywood big name actress. Plain and simple. She had couple of successes but by no means she was a "star".

Going in to Spider-Man 1, she was certainly more famous at the time than Tobey Maguire, JK Simmons and Willem Dafoe (leave alone James Franco, lol).

I mean I knew KD going in, from Jumanji and Small Soldiers. Whereas Tobey Maguire had Pleasantville, The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys and a few other roles and if he was in the press it was as Leonardo DiCaprio's pal. Dafoe had dropped out of the radar completely since the '80s. The moviegoers who knew Tobey Maguire would also know of KD's amazing performance in The Virgin Suicides.

Anyway, I don't really think it's a big deal or anything for KD to ruminate, in retrospect, she shoulda gotten a bigger slice.

[Spiderfan001]

Going in to Spider-Man 1, she was certainly more famous at the time than Tobey Maguire, JK Simmons and Willem Dafoe (leave alone James Franco, lol).

I mean I knew KD going in, from Jumanji and Small Soldiers. Whereas Tobey Maguire had The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys and a few other roles and if he was in the press it was as Leonardo DiCaprio's pal. Dafoe had dropped out of the radar completely since the '80s.

Anyway, I don't really think it's a big deal or anything for KD to ruminate, in retrospect, she shoulda gotten a bigger slice.

A big part of why Tobey got payed more for 2 was because he negotiated.His pay went up around 7 times from 1 to 2 whereas Dunst didn't.(I'd compare pays for 1 but we don't know how much Dunst made for the first one)

Again gender and popularity are far from the only factors, and all the rest are heavily in Tobey's favor.

Yes. Yes, it is. She was not the main character nor was she an established Hollywood big name actress. Plain and simple. She had couple of successes but by no means she was a "star".

This, the mental gymnastics being played here to justify her being payed as much as Tobey makes me think people here are also Twitch mods IRL.

[SpiderClops]

Going in to Spider-Man 1, she was certainly more famous at the time than Tobey Maguire, JK Simmons and Willem Dafoe (leave alone James Franco, lol).

I mean I knew KD going in, from Jumanji and Small Soldiers. Whereas Tobey Maguire had Pleasantville, The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys and a few other roles and if he was in the press it was as Leonardo DiCaprio's pal. Dafoe had dropped out of the radar completely since the '80s. The moviegoers who knew Tobey Maguire would also know of KD's amazing performance in The Virgin Suicides.

There's a difference between being more well-known and being a big star.

Anyway, I don't really think it's a big deal or anything for KD to ruminate, in retrospect, she shoulda gotten a bigger slice.

She got $10 million for a supporting role in 2004. How much bigger slice can you get? That's a good deal even today.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

She got $10 million for a supporting role in 2004. How much bigger slice can you get? That's a good deal even today.

The comparison is obviously before 2002 and 2004 right?

Part of the issue with the MCU and movie business going to streaming is that those kinds of salaries are rarer today. And obviously with the conversation about "equal pay" and the wage gap, KD is simply reflecting on the situation at the time.

At the end of the day, fans aren't studio bosses and executives so it's not our place to decide on this but at the very least, people should think twice before siding with the studio bosses on this.

[PanicPixieDreamGirl]

Did we ever establish whether Dunst objecting to unequal pay and making a few tongue-in-cheek comments made her a horrible person or not?

[Spiderfan001]

Did we ever establish whether Dunst objecting to unequal pay and making a few tongue-in-cheek comments made her a horrible person or not?

That wasn't even in regards to the just the pay thing, and "terrible" was the word used.It was in regards to her comments on the MCU and on the 4th film on top of the pay thing.

Also Dunst is just a terrible person.Wanted as much Money as Tobey(she was paid a great amount, pretty sure she got paid more than Andrew Garfield)and her idea for the next movie in Raimi-verse was kill Peter and MJ raises a Spider-baby.She also called MCU a cashgrab and "we did it best, they are just milking it dry"

And it's not unequal pay.Tobey was the lead character w/ He had a larger role, much more screen time and a more difficult job.Calling this unequal pay is indirectly disrespectful to actual cases of unequal pay and discrimination.

Also Kristen's comments are "tongue in cheek" yet you are sticking to one word I used instead of the argument itself.Double standards much

Even twitter knew this was BS, but go off

[Lukmendes]

She was the major love interest since issue 15 when Aunt May said she would be the girl Peter would marry someday.

Aunt May was senile old woman who disrespected Peter by trying to get him together with MJ when he was dating Betty back then, and when Peter actually met MJ, he decided to go for Gwen.

While she became the Spidey love interest, back at the beginning, she was little more than a running gag who Lee tried to sideline after she was introduced lol.

Never cared for comic Betty till I started associating her w/ the Raimi version tbh, Raimi nailed the side characters.

Yeah side characters are well done, I really like how Hoffman manages to teleport to JJ whenever JJ calls him, or when he thinks JJ needs support lol.

And Betty, she's weird, went from a more cowardly girl who hates adventurous people to Lois Lane-lite, so yeah.

Even Landlord Ditkovich was made human.And any person who offers chocolate cake and cookies to you is someone you should keep in your friend circle.

Poor Ursula is so ignored, like, Peter shouldn't be with her if he doesn't want to, that much is obvious, but he barely notices that she exists by default, only gave her attention when the symbiote was fucking with him and he was just using her for some food lol.

On god, I'm never not surprised by how much they can take such a good comic character and do this to them.

Yeah, it's not like they're making a whole new character, while adaptations don't necessarily have to adapt the personality so completely, get the good stuff the character has, or at least don't make them so forgettable lol.

She was asking for equal pay to the main character... I hope I don't need to explain how ridiculous that is.

"The pay disparity between me and Spider-Man was very extreme," the 39-year-old actress said, referring to Maguire. "I didn’t even think about it. I was just like, 'Oh yeah, Tobey [Maguire] is playing Spider-Man.' But you know who was on the cover of the second Spider-Man poster? Spider-Man and ME."

The difference in screen time alone makes this a false equivalence.

Andrew Garfield got payed 500k for TASM(and 1 million from TASM2 but not confirmed) whereas Dunst got around 10 Million from SM2 alone.

And Tom got payed 250k(civil war)+ 500k(homecoming)+ 4 million(for FFH) coming to a sum total of 4.75 million(IW and endgame pay hasn't been revealed yet).Not even HALF of what Dunst made in 1 Movie.

They were Spider-man and yet made less in all these movies combined(1.5 M + 4.75 M= 6.25 Million) than Dunst did in 1 Spider-man Movie...

I think she made 20 Million+ total from Spider-man, so I can't see how this is anything other than her being entitled

To be fair, even if she's being "entitled" or whatever, you gotta demand good payment when making big movies, after all, higher ups will try to pay you less no matter what, because they're greedy, trying to get a bigger slice is fine.

And yeah you can say everyone are a bunch of greedy assholes here, but, that's business, if you can get more money then go for it, if you don't you're doing the same job with less payment, and while some actors can be fine with that, others may not be, and Holland is actively being screwed over with his smaller payment here lol.

So yeah, I don't think asking for a bigger payment when possible in general is a problem lol.

[Spiderfan001]

To be fair, even if she's being "entitled" or whatever, you gotta demand good payment when making big movies, after all, higher ups will try to pay you less no matter what, because they're greedy, trying to get a bigger slice is fine.

And yeah you can say everyone are a bunch of greedy assholes here, but, that's business, if you can get more money then go for it, if you don't you're doing the same job with less payment, and while some actors can be fine with that, others may not be, and Holland is actively being screwed over with his smaller payment here lol.

So yeah, I don't think asking for a bigger payment when possible in general is a problem lol.

I absolutely agree, negotiating when the movie was being made is always good.But that's the thing, she didn't negotiate back then.So if that's the problem she should have said she didn't feel comfortable in asking for more and that's something she regrets and hopes new actresses are more forward in their demands.But that's not what she means.

And I'm again not saying getting a bigger slice is something she's wrong about, I'd 100% be on her side if she wanted more than what she got.But she's asking for as much as Tobey and her reasoning for it is quite frankly just ridiculous and ignoring so many important aspects.

Her point is I'm on the poster so I'm just as important as the main character, and should have been paid just as much even though the other person had far more screen time, a more difficult job, actually negotiated, is the character after which the movie is named, etc.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Did we ever establish whether Dunst objecting to unequal pay and making a few tongue-in-cheek comments made her a horrible person or not?

Apparently not for some people, lol. There's this adage that goes "What do they know that only England know?" which was intended to warn people against being provincial and so on, you can expand and apply this to "what do they know that only superhero movies know?"

Aunt May was senile old woman who disrespected Peter by trying to get him together with MJ when he was dating Betty back then, and when Peter actually met MJ, he decided to go for Gwen.

The same Aunt May who gave this speech in the same run:

While she became the Spidey love interest, back at the beginning, she was little more than a running gag who Lee tried to sideline after she was introduced

Well it's not just Lee, there's also Ditko. The first issue on which Steve Ditko had plotting credit was ASM#25 which had her first ever pre-appearance. So Ditko clearly intended to set her up because that was when he had control and could do anything he wanted and he instead chose to build her up.

To be fair, even if she's being "entitled" or whatever, you gotta demand good payment when making big movies, after all, higher ups will try to pay you less no matter what, because they're greedy, trying to get a bigger slice is fine.

Fan resentment is to be expected. They always object to actors getting higher salaries but never the corporations pocketing stuff off labor they don't do. They have been reared to value the IP over any of the creators and talent involved in sustaining and giving that value.

And yeah you can say everyone are a bunch of greedy assholes here, but, that's business, if you can get more money then go for it, if you don't you're doing the same job with less payment, and while some actors can be fine with that, others may not be, and Holland is actively being screwed over with his smaller payment here lol.

That's why Tom Holland was hired in the first place and it's likely why he's lately talking about bowing out because he's got regular millionaire money and not movie star money out of this gig. Robert Downey Jr. got paid $10mn for his cameo in Spider-Man Homecoming, a role that was shorter than KD but I'm sure people will bend over backwards and say how that much cash for basically 15mns screentime is somehow important and crucial than RDJ (who is famous for point-blank refusing to do any mo-cap work). RDJ earned more from those 15mns than Tom Holland did for all three movies but nobody objects to that for some reason.

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/241...man-homecoming

I mean at the end of the day RDJ is an American he knows the system and he leveraged early and hard and gets to be "Cool forever". The difference is that where KD after Spider-Man worked on a number of independent and outsider films and still does, RDJ has basically retired full time and doesn't seem to want to pay it forward, i.e. use the superhero cash to actually work in smaller films that could use the starpower.

[HypnoHustler]

The same Aunt May who gave this speech in the same run:

Yes, the same one. One good panel doesn’t negate over a hundred issues of old lady tropes.

[Spiderfan001]

The same Aunt May who gave this speech in the same run:

It's one panel which doesn't define characterization.And we have dozens/hundreds of issues that point to the contrary.

Also actions > words

[Jman27]

that panel makes me laugh that all Peter does worry about her

[Username taken]

I don't really think that Dunst was making a big deal of the pay difference, seriously that was well over a decade ago. She's just noting how much the pay gap was between she and Tobey which is her right and her opinion.

As someone else pointed out, if you can negotiate a better deal or better salary at any point in time, then go for it. But from the outside looking in, she got a very good deal at the time.

In the "franchise era" of Hollywood that we find ourselves today, it's only the top stars that command that sort of money and that's mainly through back end payments. That's certainly not money you will very rarely see nowadays as a supporting actor in a superhero film.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

that panel makes me laugh that all Peter does worry about her

It makes sense when you factor that given that Spider-Man made his debut in 1962 and was roughly contemporary to that year, it meant that May Parker and her husband absolutely had to be survivors of the Great Depression.

The comics never went into that but you can well imagine May going "back in my Day I had to get up early and sneak in the quickest shortest way to get ahead in the bread line in the soup kitchen" or "I had to haul ass and work six errands just to save up for coal to heat during the winter".