The Amazing Spider-Man 2 received a mixed response from critics and fans alike earlier this year, and while it was far from a flop with over $700 million at the worldwide box office, it was still the lowest grossing instalment in the franchise domestically to date and fell way short of the $1 billion haul Sony were hoping for.

Talking at the Toronto Film Festival recently, star Andrew Garfield talked candidly about where he believes things may have gone wrong for the The Amazing Spider-Man 2, seemingly putting at least some of the blame squarely at the feet of interfering studio executives who didn’t like certain parts of the sequel.

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.

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.

When asked to elaborate on these comments, Garfield made it clear that he’s actually grateful of any type of constructive criticism and hopes that it will help the third instalment (which is rumoured for a 2018 release) learn from past mistakes.

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.

What are your thoughts on Andrew Garfield’s comments? Do you agree that Sony need to make some serious changes for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 succeed? Let us know your thoughts on all of this in the comments section below!

SOURCE: The Daily Beast