but for the rest of the audience it was a serious case of “who’s that, what can they do, where’d the go”.
No doubt that was true for a portion of the audience, but I would hazard a guess that the true success of the films was decided by said hardcore fans. It's people my (our?) age in their early to mid 30's that are making these films successful because it was us who grew up on this stuff.
But even with us (37) we haven’t necessarily stayed current. Remember the comic industry regularly does ret-cons and semi-reboots. The version of Spidey I grew up reading wasn’t really the same as the version Stan and Jack made before I was born and neither is the same as the Spidey they’re writing in the comics now and none of them are the same as the Spidey in the movies, heck they’re even doing a bit of ret-con in this movie making Sandman the guy who killed Uncle Ben. Which is part of why you always have to do the character introductions. Even if eveybody in the audience is fans of the comics they’re going to be fans from different eras who have learned different histories of the characters none of which will exactly match what they’re doing in the movie.
I just don’t see Scret Wars as doable, it’s a great story but it’s so horribly over complicated, and I’m not sure how much of a following it has. There’s really one generation of comic book geek that knows the story so it won’t have much of an audience. It was a great story but I think it’s going to remain where it is, in the past and in paper.