Today's News: rise of the sustainable superhero

Another MS newsflash from mine own hand:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/153835/nieuwe_behind-the-scenes_featurettes_the_amazing_spider-man_2

Not much novel actual content from the movie itself here, except for some new snappy gags showing off Spidey's trademark sense of humour (sorely missed in Raimi's trilogy of Spider-films). Otherwise these are typical puff pieces, in which the cast and crew reminisce about how great it was to make this movie, how much they adored each other on set and how lucky they are to have these jobs. Which is the usual sort of thing for featurettes like these to show. They serve as little more than promotional pieces reminding you of how much you want to see this movie by displaying little new material but showing mostly 'the good times' from the set so you get the idea that these people have the greatest jobs imaginable, and therefore the resulting final film is a work of love, instead of mere business. The 'Sustainability' video is interesting in this regard too, as it reveals how much studios aim to appear as if they care about more than just the huge sums of money that are involved, in this particular case by 'going green'. Producing big blockbuster movies is after all a hugely wasteful exercise, and there's definite room for improvement there. Now that public sentiment towards ecological thinking turns ever more in the direction of widespread embrace by vast audience numbers, studios hop on this bandwagon to show the folks that are likely to buy tickets they care about the environment too. Especially in the case of giant multi-million dollar projects like this one, public relations are of the utmost importance, so the studio must appear as likeable and openminded as possible. You didn't think they were going green because it actually is the most responsible and sound thing to do, right? They're doing this because the audience needs to like their new movie in every way imaginable, and ecological thinking is "all the rage" right now. Sounds harsh? Maybe it is, but time must tell whether the current Hollywood fad of sustainable filmmaking leads to actual permanent changes in the industry and its general short-term way of thinking. That said, it's still a change in the right direction and as such a laudable objective. But I doubt most audiences will care really much about all this hard work on the sustainability front when they sit down in theaters to watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2. They just want to see their webslinging hero wisecracking around as he's kicking bad guy butt. Bad guys like the Green Goblin. See, there's some subverted ideological overtones right there...