Two weeks ago, we discussed the phenomenon of “too many cooks”. To recap, too many cooks is what happens when you let every chef into the kitchen, and the sheer excess of chefs leads to the broth being spoiled. Metaphorically, this is what happened with Spider-Man 3. History, I feel, took the lesson from this one. For years afterwards, Spider-Man and the possibility of too many cooks were linked. It was the one mistake that people making a Spider-Man movie knew not to make.
They had, as someone using the internet around the time this movie came out might say, one job.
The problem is that, as we’ve also established, Spider-Man movies are produced by a cabal of weirdos mostly disconnected from the outside world. When you or I make a mistake, we think “hey, probably ought not to do that again”. When Sony and its friends at Marvel make mistakes, they usually like to try again, but harder this time.
And so we have The Amazing Spider-Man 2, best described as “the same mistake, but more”.
But The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is so much more than a bad movie. Spider-Man 3 was a (pretty) bad movie. This, right here, is an entire industry of mistakes and hubris. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a solar system of bad, with its own planets and moons. See, this wasn’t just planned to be a sequel, continuing Peter Parker’s story from the first movie and cashing in on Sony’s luck in rebooting the franchise with the bare minimum of change. This was planned to be - oh, 2014, you were so long ago - a cinematic universe.
While The Amazing Spider-Man was in production, the guys at Sony were, as far as I can make it out, planning a linear series of movies pretty much in the same mould as the Raimi ones. Two months before it came out, though, The Avengers went ballistic, finally kicking the MCU’s popularity into the high level it’s been at ever since - and, most importantly, making the very interconnected cinematic universe the official coolest way of telling superhero stories.
(There’s really a whole pile of would-be franchises from the mid-2010s that tried to go the Avengers route. I am fascinated by them all - especially the prospective Robin Hood one where all the Merry Men were going to get solo movies - but this post is going to be painfully long enough just discussing Sony’s effort.)
It was too late to do anything for The Amazing Spider-Man, but the Spidey crew (as we’ll call the weird amalgamation of Sony and Marvel execs responsible for these movies from now on, just for convenience) didn’t miss a beat once that first movie succeeded. At first, it seemed as if the sequel would just be a basic sequel, but a few months before its release, Sony tipped their hand a bit. They announced two Amazing Spider-Man sequels for 2016 and 2018 respectively, but that was the boring part. Soon after, they also revealed they were going to try and make an entire cinematic universe around Spider-Man, starting with Venom (which had already been kicked around in the Raimi era) and Sinister Six.
All of this would be overseen by a “brain trust” - Hollywood nonsense for writer’s room, consisting of Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, Ed Solomon, and Drew Goddard, the first three of which had already worked on the TASM 2 script. If you’re well-adjusted and happy, none of those names will mean anything to you. If you’re (unfortunately) the way that I am, you’ll notice that it’s a strange mix of journeyman blockbuster writers (Kurtzman, Orci and Pinkner), one man with a truly curious bibliography including Bill & Ted, Men in Black and the live-action Super Mario Bros (Solomon) and a hotshot rising star who had worked on two acclaimed low-budget hits (Goddard). Also, no women, but this is Hollywood, and expectations are low there for a reason.
Anyway, the main thing is that Sony were trying to make their own MCU from the stable of Spider-Man characters they had the rights to. This was a curious decision even at the time (the fact that a version of it would later work is absolutely fascinating to me, but that’s for later), because Spider-Man characters are not quite the same as, like, 90% of the huge Marvel stable and the two don’t seem to equate, but anyhow. They were confident, that was for sure, announcing all of this months in advance of TASM 2, coinciding with the movie’s first trailer. So, suddenly, this wasn’t just a sequel anymore. It was Spider-Man’s Iron Man, the launching pad for a big cinematic universe doodad.
If you’ve been muttering “that sounds like too many cooks” to yourself, like a normal person, then congrats! You were right. It was far too many cooks. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is bad, of course. It’s the worst Spider-Man movie there is, and I have to presume it will always be that. It’s dogshit. I’d like to kick it into a lake.
Is it bad because of too many cooks? Yes. But not in the same way as Spider-Man 3. It evolves too many cooks. It is the next frontier in too many cooks.
The main flaw with Spider-Man 3 wasn’t that there were too many villains, per se, and but that the villains seemed to come from different stories, which meant the movie was telling too many stories. The constituent parts were alright, really, they just cohered poorly. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 makes precisely the same mistake, but fails to tell interesting individual stories. The movie should only have focused on one of Green Goblin or Electro, but neither one of those stories would have made a good movie on their own.
The Green Goblin one relies on the sitcom thing of introducing a character who’s really important in the main characters’ lives but who also came from nowhere and then stakes its villain turn on a muddled and confusing dilemma about Spider-Man’s magic blood that makes both Peter and Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan is fine, and he’s not a sexual harasser as far as I’m aware, so he’s an improvement on Franco). The Electro story is just flat-out fucking terrible, a truly baffling pile-up of dreadful decisions that encompasses a depiction of neurodivergence straight from the 1980s and a character design whose brief seems to be “Doctor Manhattan, but worse”. Both characters’ motivations are near-incomprehensible and rely on their characterisation changing off-screen.
Together, they are even worse, because their stories have nothing in common other than a hasty connection of “being thrown away”. The movie tries to have them link up halfway through so it seems as if they have something in common, but the way they relate to one another is best encompassed by how, in the final act, Green Goblin waits ever-so-politely until Spider-Man is doing fighting Electro before he enters and starts another final boss fight.
And then there’s a third story, which is the Secret History of Richard Parker, where the villain (Norman Osborn) dies after one scene in bed. This subplot is basically homework that clears up all the ominous hints the first movie established but did nothing with, and it’s very boring. Not to be that irritating Spider-Man purist that nobody likes, but honestly, the whole deal with Peter Parker’s dad being a secret scientist who experimented on the same spiders that would bite Peter is so against the spirit of the character it makes me genuinely grumpy ugh. Like, the whole point of Spider-Man is that he is the epitome of an everyday hero, a randomer called to something greater by pure chance. He’s not a chosen one here, but he’s not not a chosen one either. It’s icky and I hate it.
If you’re an ardent TASM defender - and go for it, I like Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone too and their break-up shattered something very small in my heart - you might be saying at your computer that “But they’re all connected! Oscorp is behind all three of these stories, so they’re not incoherent!”.
Like I said, I think you’re valid, hypothetical person. I can’t take away your bliss. But while the movie does have an ostensible connection between all three stories it tells, that connection is woolly bullshit. Oscorp are meaningless. What is Oscorp? Who is Oscorp? What’s their deal? We meet several Oscorp employees and execs, but none of them really represent anything other than generically bad capitalism. Norman Osborn dies after one scene, and Harry’s whole thing is getting thrown out of Oscorp. The closest we get, I guess, is the “Gentleman” character who showed up in the mid-credits of the movie and again at the end here, where he starts to form the Sinister Six, but that character is so secretive we don’t even see his face. There is nothing to latch onto with Oscorp. As an anchor for a big ambitious story filled with subplots, it’s useless.
But of course Oscorp aren’t really in the story for this story. They’re around because they’ll be important later in this Spider-Man universe thing Sony were building. They’re the big important organisation of this universe. Like Monarch in the MonsterVerse movies. Or, uh, like Prodigium in the Dark Universe.
(Sorry! Sorry. I know this is about Spider-Man, but I couldn’t mention the Dark Universe without talking about it for a moment here. I am plagued by the Dark Universe, and that Photoshop image they used to announce the casting of some of the monsters and Tom Cruise. I sometimes remember that they were going to do fucking Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame in the same universe as Dracula and the Mummy. We have lost so much in this fallen world of ours.)
Oscorp are important, basically, because they’ll help form the Sinister Six. There is no better image of what this movie and the entire Spider-Man universe endeavour did wrong than the teasing scene where that shadowy Gentleman guy walks through an Oscorp vault, which holds Doctor Octopus’ mechanical arms and Vulture’s wings, as well as Rhino’s suit, and then says they have “ideal recruits” for these positions.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrggghhhhhhhhhhh.
Sorry. But, like, what? They have a Halloween costumes vault, and every classic Spider-Man villain from there on out just gets handed a free one at random? So that every important character comes from exactly the same place?
This sucks. And it actually gets to the core of what’s wrong with almost all of these cinematic universe things (for once, I’m mostly not talking about the MCU here!), which is that they purport to make the world of their stories feel bigger and more expansive, but what they really do is make it feel smaller, by explaining the origin of everything and having everyone be connected to one another. There isn’t room for genuine variety or imagination, because everything must be cohesive, which is basically code for everything being the same. If this Spider-Man universe had really gone ahead, it would have felt like a cinematic small village, where you couldn’t go somewhere new without having to stop and chat to your neighbour about what you’ve been up to.
This form of storytelling is what happens when capitalist influence completely subsumes artistic intent. Any real human feeling in the story is secondary to maintaining the brand and ensuring there are enough cryptic hints and Easter eggs to seed future instalments. The Peter and Gwen relationship is the only thing with a soul in this, but it’s underemphasised to make room for all the villain machinations, and then discarded because Gwen dies in the comics and therefore the movies must do the same because that’s what people expect. Peter grieves for about five on-screen minutes, which is enough to make the movie look like it’s trying, but then he becomes Spider-Man again, because there aren’t sequels and spin-offs if there isn’t Spider-Man. There’s something vaguely moving in there, but it’s swallowed by the need to make the themes digestible and disposable enough to not get in the way of all the big exciting set-up.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a fundamentally depressing piece of work, all the more so because a version of this character with a soul had existed a handful of years before. Here, there’s nothing behind the eyes, nothing that lingers in the memory. In a way, it was ahead of its time, because there is no better way to describe this movie than “content” - filler to bulk up a streaming service’s library and catch wandering eyeballs with a familiar brand.
And if you don’t believe me on it - which is fair, I barely do, all of this political stuff sounds weird in my mouth - then take Andrew Garfield’s word for it, in an interview that came out just a few days ago.
“Comic-Con in San Diego is full of grown men and women still in touch with that pure thing the character meant to them. [But you] add in market forces and test groups and suddenly the focus is less on the soul of it and more on ensuring we make as much money as possible. And I found that – find that – heartbreaking in all matters of the culture. Money is the thing that has corrupted all of us and led to the terrible ecological collapse that we are all about to die under.”
There is something truly meaningful at the core of this character, and of so many comic characters like him - it’s the reason why I’ve gravitated to Spider-Man, and why I adore the best adaptations of him. But at its worst, all that sincerity is drained, and there’s nothing left but Spider-Man as lucrative brand. People’s sincere love for something is taken and entered into a machine and rearranged according to profit margin. It’s a good reminder, really, that Hollywood isn’t separate from the capitalist machine, isn’t some bold artistic machine speaking truth to power. It’s just a part of it all as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. It’ll even churn up the main person responsible for bringing it to life, because no one person is important in this system.
I’d make some shitty jokes here if I could, but I can’t actually think of any. It’s genuinely just depressing.
Really, the only thing surprising about any of this is that it failed. People didn’t like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 very much. It was the lowest-grossing and poorest-reviewed Spider-Man film ever, I suspect for many of the reasons I’ve listed above.
If you want something redeemable out of all this, I guess it’s that people can say no to what capitalism offers. They can ask for better. Of course, what then happens is that capitalism adjusts and keeps going, and people get crushed under its boot anew, but y’know. We got Spider-Man to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not all bad.
Next time: Whew, that was a bummer, huh? Let’s dig ourselves out of that. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, reboot number two, Spidey joined the MCU and became a son-friend of Iron Man. This both improved the franchise significantly and introduced a whole new bunch of ethical questions. But, like, I’m pretty sure I can make jokes about these ones.