What did YOU think about the new Spider-Man movie?

I watched the new Spider-Man movie, “The Amazing Spider-Man,” last Saturday, and it was pretty good. It didn’t knock me off my feet or anything, but it was still pretty good, definitely worth watching.

Released on July 3, this PG-13 movie is a rehash of the Spider-Man origin story. Directed by Marc Webb, the movie stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Martin Sheen and Sally Field. Garfield plays Peter Parker, aka, Spider-Man. Stone portrays his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and Leary plays her dad, NYPD Capt. George Stacy. Ifans is the bad guy, Dr. Curt Connors, aka, The Lizard. Sheen is Peter’s uncle, and Field is Aunt May Parker. James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves wrote the screenplay.

It’s hard not to compare this movie to the three Spider-Man movies that were released in 2002, 2005 and 2007. Those popular films starred Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. Mary-Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst) was his girlfriend in all of those movies, but Mary-Jane doesn’t even make an appearance in “The Amazing Spider-Man.”

One big difference between the earlier three Spider-Man movies and “The Amazing Spider-Man” is that the new movie doesn’t play up the Peter Parker-newspaper angle at all. In the comics and in the first three Spider-Man movies, Parker works as a photographer for The Daily Bugle newspaper. This is barely even hinted at in the new movie, which doesn’t even star the over-the-top, yet popular character, J. Jonah Jameson, the publisher of The Bugle.

While J. Jonah Jameson wasn’t in the movie, Stan Lee was. Lee, who created Spider-Man along with Steve Ditko in the 1960s, made a cameo appearance – just like he has in many of the other recent Marvel Comics movies. In “The Amazing Spider-Man” he’s shown as a headphones-wearing librarian who’s busy stamping library books while Spider-Man and The Lizard battling it out behind him. It’s one of the more funny moments in the movie.

Another cool thing about “The Amazing Spider-Man” is that it was released around the 50th anniversary of Spider-Man’s first appearance. As many of you comic book aficionados out there will know, Spidey made his first appearance in Marvel Comic’s Amazing Fantasy #15, which was published in August 1962.

If you liked “The Amazing Spider-Man,” you’ll probably be interested to hear that a sequel is being planned and that there will also likely be a third movie to follow. The second movie is scheduled to be released in May 2014, so it’s going to be a while. Money is a factor in the decision to release sequels, and the producers were probably pretty pleased by the first movie’s box office showing. Shot on a budget of around $230 million, “The Amazing Spider-Man” has raked in revenues of nearly $378 million as of this writing.

In the end, how many of you have seen “The Amazing Spider-Man”? What did you think about it? How do you think it compares to the earlier Spider-Man movies? Let us know in the comments section below.