Spider-Man 3: the sequel that launched a thousand dancing Peter memes. The film that exposed Peter Parker's dark side, a persona so vile and degenerate as to border on just being kind of a jazz club dweeb. A movie that looked at its predecessors' careful explorations of their villains' psyches and bravely asked, "What if we didn't do that this time?"

In today's climate, it can seem like a superhero movie doesn't really "count" unless there's a crossover cameo and the looming promise of a hundred sequels. It can be easy to forget that the relatively self-contained Sam Raimi Spider-Man films were some of the most popular movies of their time. Along with X-Men, 2002's Spider-Man is credited with starting the modern comic book movie boom. The first two installments grossed over $1.5 billion and received rave reviews. When the time came for the inevitable followup, expectations were high, and so was the budget, which rocketed to an estimated $258 million.

What resulted was the highest-grossing movie of the year, but a bummer for the fans. Director Sam Raimi even called the threequel "awful," and admitted that he shouldn't have tried to top himself as hard as he did.