I originally thought that Raimi should have just bitten the bullet and made the movie everyone wanted to see: Spider-Man vs Venom, one of the few modern villains to capture the public's imagination. But rewatching it, I realize the opposite to be true: Raimi should have been allowed to make the movie he wanted to make, leaving Venom for a fourth (most likely Raimi-free) edition. The new director (and possibly new cast) would have benefited from having such a popular character to start out with, and Raimi would've had a solid trilogy in his belt. Because here's the thing — minus the Venom-included fourth act, Raimi largely succeeded in created a good Sandman-focused movie.

Sure, there were problems in the first hour and a half, but most of them could have been fixed by the simply having more time to develop plot points, instead of cramming them in. The movie would have always been over two hours long, so if Raimi and company were freed from having to cram in one more villain into that time, we could had better explanations for the black costume, a better use of Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), a more plausible interlude for Harry than convenient memory loss, and a more naturalistic descent into darkness for Peter than a nightclub sequence.

Some people think this movie went astray by turning Peter Parker emo, but I disagree. The goal was to make us see how far Peter was sliding due to the influence of the alien symbiote costume. The problem is that modern audiences wouldn't see a more aggressive Spider-Man as a bad thing, having grown accustomed to cheering for darker heroes like Batman and Wolverine. Instead, they needed to turn Peter Parker into a douchebag, and what easier shorthand for that in the year 2007 is there than emo bangs? They didn't make him emo to make him cool, they did it to make us hate him, so mission accomplished! Hell, they should've gone further with it, then his downward spiral wouldn't have had to end in the clichéd accidental striking of Mary Jane. Instead, MJ could've just forced him to look down at his girl jeans during a douchebag intervention, which would've been enough to drive Peter to the bell tower in an attempt to tear the symbiote off.