Looking back in hindsight, it’s fair to say that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wasn’t the commercial or indeed critical hit that many had anticipated. Deemed a mish-mash that was too concerned of establishing threads for future films in the series — much like Iron Man 2, actually — Marc Webb’s sequel failed to emulate the success of the other Spider-man 2 when it arrived in theaters earlier this year.
So, what went wrong? Well, although many attributed its faults to an overwhelming amount of material — a stash that caused the running time to balloon past two hours and twenty minutes — the missing factor could be attributed to story elements that remained on the cutting room floor. That’s according to Peter Parker himself, Andrew Garfield, who spoke to The Daily Beast and reflected back on his latest outing in the spandex suit.
“It’s interesting. I read a lot of the reactions from people and I had to stop because I could feel I was getting away from how I actually felt about it. For me, I read the script that Alex [Kurtzman] and Bob [Orci] wrote, and I genuinely loved it. There was this thread running through it. I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it—because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related.
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.”
Alas, given that Marc Webb’s sequel was such a hot property for Sony during the blockbuster season, it seems alterations and script changes actually hurt the project in the long run. Because in reality, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had its fair share of electrifying moments (no pun intended) that were undeniably held together by the glue of Garfield and Emma Stone’s heartwarming chemistry; it was simply lacking a coherent narrative that was clearly a consequence of last-minute studio interference.
Further in the interview, Garfield went on to add his own honest opinion to The Amazing Spider-man 2 discussion, which you can read in full below.
But I’ll tell you this: Talking about the experience as opposed to how it was perceived, I got to work in deep scenes that you don’t usually see in comic book movies, and I got to explore this orphan boy—a lot of which was taken out, and which we’d explored more. It’s interesting to do a postmortem. I’m proud of a lot of it and had a good time, and was a bit taken aback by the response.
It’s a discernment thing. What are the people actually saying? What’s underneath the complaint, and how can we learn from that? We can’t go, “Oh God, we fucked up because all these people are saying all these things. It’s shit.” We have to ask ourselves, “What do we believe to be true?” Is it that this is the fifth Spider-Man movie in however many years, and there’s a bit of fatigue? Is it that there was too much in there? Is it that it didn’t link? If it linked seamlessly, would that be too much? Were there tonal issues? What is it? I think all that is valuable. 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.