Spidey’s Back!
The audience has spoken. We miss Spider-Man. Proven to be bigger than all of the Avengers, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is smashing records left and right just as Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi’s first film did back in 2002 (which can be argued that it’s responsible for the genre boom in the new millennium). It’s been almost five years since the last Spider-Man movie, and that one was seemingly a tough act to follow, with it being a multiverse celebration of the entire film brand as multiple past cast members make their glorious return to the franchise.
Tom Rothman speaks
While Spider-Man is a reliable property, Sony has seen its share of misfortunes when it came to the brand. The attempted reboot series with Andrew Garfield wasn’t able to compete with the blossoming Marvel Cinematic Universe and all the Avengers characters were taking off, along with some more obscure characters, like Guardians of the Galaxy. And Sony has come to its senses recently in that, despite the Venom series experiencing success in its own right, the studio will not attempt to make more Spider-Man spin-off movies like Madame Web or Kraven or Morbius.
However, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony’s Tom Rothman reveals that he has not officially signed Tom Holland on for more movies yet, “No, not in any concrete sense — only aspirational.” But he is incredibly pleased to hear that Holland has been enthusiastically open to play Peter Parker for more entries, “I can tell you when I heard that Tom said that, I jumped for joy. All I will say is that hope springs eternal. I really hope so.”
So, what lesson is Rothman taking away from this? One of them seems not to be oversaturating the market and create some scarcity. Having to wait five years for the next entry was the perfect way to get audiences yearning. Another part of the hiatus was to figure out how to top No Way Home. He explained, “[Initially,] the problem for a while was, ‘How do you top that? What do we do next when we just put in all our Spider-Men? The strategic decision was — rather than trying what we all thought would be perhaps an empty effort of going quote, unquote bigger — we just went deeper. That was a very conscious choice to focus on how we could make the audience feel. We were fortunate enough to have a director who was able to balance emotion and spectacle.”
With the business that Brand New Day is doing now, and Rothman chalking it up to scarcity, we may have to expect that Spider-Man will not return as soon as we may hope.
The comment section exists to allow readers to discuss the article constructively and respectfully, focused on the topic at hand.
What’s Not Allowed