Everyone has their own Spider-man. The one from the comics, the one from the animated series of the 90s, the one from Sam Raimi’s movies, or the current one from Marvel, it doesn’t matter. There is only one thing that is clear: no one in the world believes that “their” Spider-man is the one from the musical that was meant to change everything on Broadway in 2011 and crashed spectacularly. It didn’t take Doctor Octopus or the Green Goblin: a disastrous staging, a good handful of controversies, and an audience that, by that point, no longer wanted to know anything about the arachnid were enough. This is the very sad story of Turn Off the Dark, the U2 musical with Spider-man that failed brutally.
Turn off the light (of the theater)
This was not the first time, mind you, that Marvel turned the spider into a musical. In 1972, it released an album titled Spider-Man: From Beyond the Grave: A Rockomic, which did not have the necessary appeal to do more. But hey, 40 years had passed since then, enough time for the audience to more easily accept a superhero musical, right? After all, the following year, The Avengers was set to premiere, and Marvel was sailing smoothly, how could the audience not want to see Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark?
Bono and The Edge, the members of U2, would provide the soundtrack, while experts in theater and Marvel comics would handle the rest of the script, which told the origin of Spidey, his romance with Mary Jane, and his battle against the Green Goblin. The same old story but singing and dancing, you know. What was the problem? They wanted it to be so spectacular that it would have continuous aerial battles, with the cost that this implied: several actors ended up injured, the premiere date was constantly delayed and, when it finally came to light, nobody liked it. But was it really that bad?
Well, yes, the truth is: the musical holds the world record for the most expensive Broadway production in history, at 75 million dollars. The only way to recover it was to perform non-stop for many years, and that didn’t happen: although the first week of sales broke the ticket record, by November 19, 2013, there was no one who wanted to go, and they announced that they would close the doors on January 4, 2014: after two and a half years, the investors lost 60 million dollars. Something like the plot of The Producers, but without aiming for failure.
It was, to put it bluntly, the chronicle of an announced death: in 2009, a year before even starting the previews for the premiere, they already owed 25 million dollars, and shortly after, in March, it became 52 million… Which led to Disney not wanting to take on this impending disaster when they bought Marvel. Specialized critics rated it as one of the worst musicals in history, and although a record was made, if we know how it was, it is only thanks to the pirate recordings of the time. Given what we’ve seen, it’s normal that they were embarrassed. There are times when the cobwebs just don’t catch on.
Interestingly, there is a character that was created exclusively for the work, Swiss Miss, who appears briefly in Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse. At least something positive could be taken from this disaster!
