As I wrote in my review when the film was published earlier this year, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a bit of a mess. While there is a good deal to like about it, from just about all the lead performances to some killer action sequences, the whole things was ultimately brought down by inconsistent tones, messy plots, poor structure, and bad character development. I was far from the only person who felt this way, and sections of the internet have been very vocal about the issues. Naturally, this word of mouth found its way back to star Andrew Garfield, but what's really interesting is who he puts the blame on for the final result.
With his new film 99 Homes debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, Garfield recently sat down with The Daily Beast for an interview, and when the subject turned to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 the actor actually became rather candid with his own personal feelings on the end result. Starting by defending the script written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, saying that he "genuinely loved it," Garfield explained that the movie wound up going through the wringer as it moved through pre-production, production, and post-production. Pretty clearly blaming the changes made by the studio, the actor said,
"Once you start removing things and saying, 'No, that doesn’t work,' then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story. Certain people at the studio had problems with certain parts of it, and ultimately the studio is the final say in those movies because they’re the tentpoles, so you have to answer to those people.
So what exactly was cut that Garfield felt would have kept the movie together? While he didn't get too specific about it, apparently there was a good deal more in the movie exploring Peter Parker's existence as a "orphan boy." The actor described these sequences as "deep scenes that you don’t usually see in comic book movie," but it would seem that Sony was unhappy with the level of action vs. drama in the film and decided to cut it all out.
Rather than just pointing fingers and finding people to blame for The Amazing Spider-Man 2's lesser qualities, however, Andrew Garfield also added that the filmmakers behind the franchise are working hard to really zone in on what went wrong with the movie so that they can improve the series going forward. While part of doing that is navigating around all of the dumb people on the internet who hate on the film without explanation, they are looking at what people didn't like about the final product and plan to utilize the knowledge they gain in the future. Said Garfield,
"Constructive criticism is different from people just being dicks, and I love constructive criticism. Hopefully, we can get underneath what the criticism was about, and if we missed anything."
Next up in the Amazing Spider-Man franchise will be Drew Goddard's villain team-up film The Sinister Six, which will be in theaters on November 11, 2016. That will be followed by The Amazing Spider-Man 3 in 2018, but Sony has also announced plans to make a female-driven feature relating to the Spidey universe some time in 2017.
