Marisa Tomei is Aunt May!

Marisa Tomei, by David Shankbone
[GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0],
via Wikimedia Commons

As we all know, the greatest casting decision in the history of Hollywood was the one to hire John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

Who better for that part than a man determined to play a medieval Mongolian warlord as if he were the sheriff of Dodge City?

But now there's an even greater casting decision been made - because the internet has informed me that Marisa Tomei is to play Aunt May in the next Spider-Man movie.

I would put it to the world that this is not only the greatest casting decision in the history of humanity. It's probably the greatest decision of any kind in the history of humanity.

Quite frankly, this is an act of perverse genius.

It's perverse because, on the face of it, it makes no sense at all to cast a woman who is sex on legs as an ailing octogenarian widow.

On the other hand, it's genius because it means we presumably won't have to endure the sight of Aunt May doddering around, clutching her chest and declaring, "My heart!" every time anything exciting happens. Something she managed to do almost every month for all the years in which I was a reader of the strip.

I can understand that having a character constantly on the verge of death does add dramatic tension to a strip but it also, like Aunt May, does tend to get old very quickly.

The casting also deals with the problem I've moaned about before on this blog. Which is, just how exactly can a boy who gets his powers in his mid-teens possibly have an aunt who appears to be in her eighties? To achieve this, she'd have to be older than her own mother. In fact, she'd probably have to be older than her own grandmother.

But of course the thing that really makes it a stroke of genius is it's Marisa Tomei. Unlike John Wayne, Marisa Tomei is a brilliant actor and should, by law, be in every film ever made.

And that's why it's a great decision.

Because, in the end, it's how good the cast are that'll make the film work. Not how old they are.

I therefore - despite the hornets' nest the casting has stirred up - give a great big Steve Does Comics thumbs-up to the greatest casting choice ever.