To recap from a previous post, Sony is having a hard time wrangling their one big franchise, Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and Venom are plagued with shuffling release dates, a star who’s only signed for one more movie, and people behind the scenes (Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) casting doubts on the franchise’s future. Sony is also working on a female-led spin-off which seems to be going nowhere (and let’s not even address the Aunt May rumors).
It seems there may have been too many cooks in this thing from the very beginning, which became especially obvious in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Full disclosure: I wasn’t a fan of the second film, but I’m not alone. Another person knocking the film is Oscar-winning composer James Horner, who scored 156 movies including Braveheart, Titanic, Avatar, several Star Trek movies, and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Horner didn’t return to score the sequel and was replaced by Hans Zimmer for reasons he explained with complete candor in a long interview at JHFM:
JHFM: “So The Amazing Spider-Man was quite unusual for you, it was probably the director’s personality that brought you to this project, because he had a different vision for this film?”
JAMES HORNER: “[Marc Webb] was very inexperienced and he and I had a very good relationship and the producers had their own opinion. And they didn’t want his input. And then Sony had their own, they just wanted action. To me, the whole thing about doing the movie was I liked the director and there was a chance to write something for the two lead characters and then she dies in the next movie. But the next movie ended up being so terrible, I didn’t want to do it. It was just dreadful.” [emphasis ours]
That right there is a master level of “No f*cks given”. It also fits with what Andrew Garfield has said about studio notes interfering too much with the sequel.
Sony’s opinion of all this bashing can probably be summed up with a GIF, which I’ll stare at while I try to get the “Too Many Cooks” theme song out of my head.
