In an interview with The Daily Beast at the Toronto Film Festival to talk about his new movie 99 Homes, Andrew Garfield was quizzed on how he felt to see the very divided (and mostly negative) response to The Amazing Spider-Man 2. "It’s interesting," he told the site. "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."
I think it's fair to say that none of us will be surprised to hear that many of The Amazing Spider-Man 2's problems are a result of inteference from the studio or producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach. They forced Venom into the critically panned Spider-Man 3 and made major changes to The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 leading to it feeling extremely disjointed in places. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 meanwhile was a complete mess. "But I’ll tell you this," Garfield added, "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."
Asked to elaborate on this, the British actor said: "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 [frick]ed 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." I've given The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a hard time, and I think it deserves one because it had some serious issues in terms of tone and story. However, it's refreshing to see an actor address these issues directly and show a genuine concern about what needs to now be done in order to fix the franchise moving forwards. With it unclear whether or not Garfield will appear in The Sinister Six and The Amazing Spider-Man 3 given no firm release date, what happens next remains to be seen. What do you guys think? Share yoru thoughts in the usual place!
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