There’s a saying that time heals all wounds, however that unfortunately wasn’t the case for Andrew Garfield, who reflected negatively on his experience with ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ franchise in a recent interview with Variety.
“There’s something that happened with that experience for me where story and character were not actually top of the priority list, ultimately. And I found that really, really tricky. I signed up to serve the story and to serve this incredible character I’d been dressing as since I was 3. Then it gets compromised, and it breaks my heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”
There is a slight sense that Garfield was putting on his PR face when saying all that, rather than completely letting loose. But he does make it clear he was not happy with the direction Sony were taking that franchise.
It’s no secret that I loathe the ‘Amazing’ franchise, which remains to be the supreme example of shallow film-making, audience pandering, and failure to understand the source material on the most basic level, that I have ever seen in blockbuster franchise. And if anything, what Garfield says about “story and character” not being top priority just shows the mentality those films were made with.
I mean, we are talking about a film series that only exists because Sony didn’t want to lose the rights to Marvel. And given the release ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ next year… yeah, that worked out well for them didn’t it.
Just to give an image of how pathetic the resulting film series was, Captain America was released in 2011. A year before the first Amazing Spider-Man, and now we’ve just had the release of Civil War, the third Captain America film, with a brand new reboot of Spider-Man involved. That, is how insignificant the Amazing Spider-Man films ended up being.
After all that, it’s understandable why Garfield feels heartbroken over those films. He’s just a massive fan, who wanted to the character justice, and thanks to Sony and the producer-driven manufacturing of the films he starred in, he never got the chance.
But I think it’s an overreaction to feel any extreme levels of pity for the guy. While his superhero career was short-lived, his acting career since has just gone from strength to strength, putting in performances that are literal miles above his interpretation of Peter Parker.
His performance in Hacksaw Ridge is getting praised through the roof by critics, and he’s going to star in a Martin Scorsese film; I reckon his career’s gonna be just fine, and the Amazing Spider-Man films can’t put a dent on that.
Source: Variety