both quality and quantity of competition. The super hero genre boom was sort of just getting off to a start when Spider-Man came out. We had that and X-Men. Expectations were set low because the last major superhero movie (not counting Blade- lots of people today STILL don't realize that was based on a comic book) was Batman Forever. X-Men and Spider-Man were fresh, exciting takes on the genre that wowed us the same way Tim Burton's Batman did in 1989. Now, Spidey-sense is competing not just with the X-Men, but with the Avengers, Superman, Batman, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Wolverine solo films, Captain America solo films, Iron Man solo films, Thor solo films, The Kick-Ass movies and more. You need to step up your game to compete, and Spider-Man didn't.

What's more, thee third Spider-Man was atrocious, and they didn't wait long enough to reboot to get the bad taste out of people's mouths. Especially when the marketing for The Amazing Spider-Man movies made it look like it was going to be visually and totally the exact same thing. When you are trying to make people forget but your last shitty movie, it's not good if your trailer reminds them of it.

And that brings me to the final point: you only get away with so much. Spider-Man was stunning at the time but doesn't really hold up now, Spider-Man 2 was much better, but still didn't get all that well.Spider-Man 3 was a giant steaming turd of movie, and the public had the franchise on a short leash following that. The next film needed to be amazing in order to get us past that. And Amazing Spider-Man wasn't, which led us to Amazing Spider-Man 2. It wasn't even that bad, really, but it needed to be truly incredible and it wadn't. And it happened to hit in the same year as Captain America 2, X-Men Days of Future Past and Guardians of the Galaxy. Death sentence right there.

In short, Spider-Man 3 was so bad thatit actually managed to kill it's own reboot 7 years later.Of that hadn't been as bad as it was, we may have continued to get mediocre Spider-Man films.