With teams of trained, skilled, and highly efficient special effects personnel, directors these days have a lot of machinery around them to help when it comes time to step onto a blockbuster set. The past few years have seen a strong number of filmmakers pivoting from indie films to franchise efforts — Gareth Edwards, Colin Trevorrow, Matt Reeves, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, etc. — but Marc Webb might have been at the forefront of the wave.
Hot off “(500) Days Of Summer,” the director was hired by Sony for “The Amazing Spider-Man,” which had the difficult task of not only rebooting the brand following Sam Raimi‘s trilogy, but starting a whole new cinematic universe. The resulting films were a bit of a mess, and the box office take didn’t meet the studio’s expectations, and after two entries, the series was canned, and will be restarted again this summer with “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” The years spent with Spidey couldn’t have been easy on Webb, but looking back, the director says that he’s ultimately happy with what he was able to accomplish.
“It’s hard for me to think about it, in terms of regrets. There are so many things that I’m proud of. There was an ambition with the second movie, in particular. The idea that it’s a superhero that can’t save everybody is something that I’m really proud of. I’m really proud of the ambition of that because it’s an important message, and I believe in that. I believe in what we were after,” he told Collider. “They’re really, really difficult movies to make. They’re complex in ways that people don’t fully understand. They weren’t disasters. But in terms of regrets, I don’t think of it in those terms. I felt really, really fortunate to have that opportunity. That’s a whole other long, in-depth conversation that I probably shouldn’t have publicly. I loved everybody involved. I really did. I didn’t have an adversarial relationship with the studio, at all. There were a lot of very smart people. These are just incredibly complicated movies to make. I am proud of them, in many ways, and I stand by them. I’m certainly not a victim, in that situation.”
As for the mooted “The Amazing Spider-Man 3,” Webb reveals that development didn’t get that far along.
“We finished the second one and they were working on ‘Sinister Six,’ so we all took a break. And then, the Sony hack happened and everything went away. But, that’s the way Hollywood works sometimes,” he said.
Webb’s “Gifted” is in cinemas now, and he has another new movie not far behind, with “The Only Living Boy In New York” opening on August 11th.