Instead, I'll just praise Raimi and his stable of screenwriters for the thoughtfulness of their narrative construction. Since there is likely no one reading this who doesn't already know who Spider-Man is, I won't bore you with a plot recap of the trilogy. This was so much the case that, when Spider-Man ultimately went on to gross nearly a billion dollars worldwide, it didn't seem like a cynical victory of marketing over substance but instead a triumph of genuinely earnest, populist moviemaking. Even more importantly, Raimi clearly had a passion for the character that transcended the obviously engineered, audience-pleasing elements of what was clearly meant to be a 'franchise starter' of a picture. The first film was the perfect commercial marriage between a piece of iconic, classic comic book pulp and a filmmaker with a wholly unique visual sensibility tailor-made for the material. Arriving on the scene in 1981 with his classic cult-horror film The Evil Dead, over the course of the next twenty years Raimi continued to hone his craft as a filmmaker to the point where by the time he landed 2002's Spider-Man, he wasn't just a cult director who got lucky, but rather an accomplished filmmaker who at last found the project he'd been preparing to make all along. Much of the credit for the success of the films belongs, of course, to Sam Raimi. That makes all three Spider-Man films feel less like a bunch of strung-together episodes, and more like one cohesive, six-odd-hour motion picture with three well-designed and perfectly-proportioned acts. And even the supporting characters and subplots have been constructed with care and attention to an eventual trilogy in mind. It's always Tobey Maguire in the Spidey costume. Instead of a series of patchwork sequels featuring a bunch of different guys in a Batsuit, guided by a bunch of different directors (each with seemingly contradictory visions), with Spider-Man, much of the creative team has been on board since day one. Maybe that's why I find a franchise like Spider-Man more compelling than, say, those old Batman films of the late '80s and early '90s.

Likewise, the behind-the-scenes talent is also often in it for the long haul, giving many of today's biggest franchises a unified consistency of tone, approach and performance that's quite unique to recent cinema.

That means that the guy you fell in love with playing Spider-Man in the first movie is almost certain to be the same guy you'll see in Part III. If there's one good thing to come out of Hollywood's love affair with film franchises, it's that now, even before a movie proves itself to be a blockbuster, usually the cast and filmmakers have already been contractually locked in for later sequels.

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