It took years for the Internet to notice our video, but now it’s a global hit, especially in one unexpected country.
It sounds kind of weird to call a movie that made 700 million dollars a disappointment, but that’s pretty much the consensus on 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The lukewarm response from audiences and critics was enough to bring an end to the Andrew Garfield-led arc of the franchise, and the superhero himself went into live-action stasis until he was rebooted years later as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn’t the only Spidey flop of 2014. On April 24, 2014, one day before the movie’s debut in Japanese theaters, our reporter Go Hatori released a cinematic movie of his own: the 98-second video I Tried to Run Away from Spider-Man, which can be seen exclusively through SoraNews24’s YouTube channel.
▼ Go, getting into character
As the story begins, Go dresses up in a Spider-Man costume, which has him feeling so much like a Marvel hero that he starts posing on top of a table…
…only to be surprised when another Spider-Man, ostensibly the real one, bursts in.
Things start off on a friendly note, as the sudden Spidey is willing to play along with our cosplaying reporter…
…until Go suddenly decides to run away. Apparently, though, Spider-Man has hunting dog-like instincts and will automatically give chase.
Since Go doesn’t have super speed, Spider-Man quickly catches up to him and takes him down like a comic book villain-of-the-month…
…but in the end, the two patch things up, and the adventure comes to an end.
To be honest, we’re not sure what kind of emotional response Go was hoping for, and we weren’t the only ones who were confused. Go’s video got hardly any views, and the response to the article he wrote promoting it was also pretty much nonexistent. Feeling embarrassed at having spent company time producing something no one really seemed to care about, Go rededicated himself to more earnest professional pursuits, like testing stress-relieving throwable poo balls, wrestling his coworkers on the office floor, and figuring out ways to literally get paid for sleeping.
▼ Go, trying to be a model employee
And then, a little over half a year ago, something strange happened: people started watching I Tried to Run Away from Spider-Man. Take a look at the video’s view record, which after being a flat line for years suddenly leaps up like the heart monitor for a zombie that’s been brought back from the dead through an elixir made of equal parts necromantic herbs and high-caffeine espresso.
Granted, when you’re starting from practically zero, any increase could look like a significant spike, right? So let’s take another look at the video on YouTube and see how many views it’s got now.
Hmm…still just 106, huh? Oh, wait, we missed a comma, so…wow! 106 thousand! Pretty goo- oh, sorry, there’re two commas, bringing the view count to…
…over 106 million!?!?!
Yep, as of this writing, Go’s incredibly cheesy Spider-Man fan film has racked up 106,913,336 views. The story gets even weirder, though, because most of the views aren’t coming from Japan. Nor is the biggest source of views the U.S., Spider-Man’s homeland. Nope, the with which I Tried to Run Away from Spider-Man has struck the deepest chord is…
…Vietnam, though apparently this is also the sort of content a lot of people in India have been waiting for as well.
We’ve got no idea why this is happening (and it’s still going on, as in the time it took to write the last paragraph, I Tried to Run Away from Spider-Man got another roughly 15,000 views). Does Go, in the brief moment of the video in which he’s visible before slipping on the Spider-Man suit, somehow encompass all the physical traits and charisma Vietnamese movie-goers want in a leading man? Are Indian audiences seeing a deeper nuance hidden in what even Go thinks is such a paper-thin plot that the movie’s title itself is basically a comprehensive spoiler?
We’ve got no clue, and if anyone, and we mean anyone, has any idea of what caused the international YouTube community to embrace our video so warmly after years of giving it the cold shoulder, please let us know. Go is itching to start production on I Tried to Run Away from Spider-Man 2, but our boss won’t give him the green light until we can figure out what happened with Part 1.
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[ Read in Japanese ]