The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was… not amazing. And, as the third movie gets delayed and will possibly never arrive, the buck-passing has begun, starting with Andrew Garfield.
Garfield is currently on the press circuit promoting a do-gooder documentary, so he sat down with the Daily Beast to talk about said documentary. Cutting through all the boring and pretentious parts, we come to this:
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.
This is the part where I remind you this movie was more than two hours long, less credits. Oh, and we already know some of what was cut out, and… let’s say Garfield has a higher opinion of what got cut than we do.
Does the studio deserve a share of the blame? Absolutely. It’s pretty clear that part of the reason the movie was so overstuffed and rushed was because of corporate mandates to cram in lots of characters. But somehow we doubt the studio was responsible for, say, Spidey’s longing web-hand to Gwen, or the Rhino being Boris Badenov in a mech, or basically anything Jamie Foxx got stuck doing as Electro. No, those were ideas somebody had, and nobody could stop them from being worked in.
So, yeah, nice try, Andy. But there’s plenty of blame at this particular buffet. At least the non-Spidey movies are promising.
