This morning it was announced that 26 year old British actor Andrew Garfield has been cast in the coveted role of Spiderman.

The casting comes after the powers that be in Hollywood decided that, rather than going ahead and making Spiderman 4 with Tobey Maguire, (Who would be reprising the role he played in the previous three movies). They would rather re-boot the series and send the character of Peter Parker back to high school. (Apparently this will help tap into the Twilight and High School Musical audience)

Although an unusual decision it’s not all that surprising, as we have seen franchises on both the big and small screen re-booted time and again.

What makes this Spiderman re-boot unusual however is that Sam Raimi’s Spiderman trilogy is widely praised as being the re-invention of the superhero genre of movies, as Raimi’s Spiderman kept very closely to the comic book origins of the character and wasn’t the commercialised caricature that other franchises such as Batman unfortunately had to deal with in the 1990s.

From Spiderman came the X Men, from the X Men came Batman Begins. Now we have an industry where the biggest releases are superhero movies, next summer sees the release of Thor and Captain America from Marvel studios and Green Lantern from DC Comics, which are all guaranteed to be massive successes.

Spiderman isn’t the first re-boot, and it certainly won’t be the last. Many will be sceptical about casting a 26 year old Brit as a high school Peter Parker, I would be too. However, I was initially concerned about the casting of Matt Smith as Doctor Who, and he is possibly the best incarnation of the Doctor ever.