Despite the pandemic wreaking havoc on the entertainment industry, very few people in Hollywood had a 2021 quite as successful as Andrew Garfield, even if one of the four movies he starred in ended up getting lost in the shuffle due to the success enjoyed by the other three.
As well as landing his second Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards for leading acclaimed musical biopic Tick, Tick… Boom!, Garfield lent support to Best Actress winner Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which also went home with the prize for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
There was also the small matter of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which became the sixth highest-grossing film in the history of cinema and led to renewed calls for Garfield’s Peter Parker to be rewarded with The Amazing Spider-Man 3, which in turn left social media satire Mainstream in the dust.
As you’d expect, Garfield was praised for his performance, but everyone was expecting Mainstream to be vastly superior to what we ended up getting, so it was largely swept under the rug and instantly labeled a disappointment. However, it’s been finding an audience on streaming this week, having exploded out of nowhere to come within touching distance of the iTunes Top 20 rankings, as per FlixPatrol.
After premiering at Venice in September 2020, industry royalty Gia Coppola’s attempt at topical social commentary was quietly sent out into the wilderness in May of 2021, where it promptly sank without a trace after middling reviews deemed Mainstream instantly dated, self-indulgent, and nowhere near as smart or cutting as it thought it was.