No, Andrew Garfield Cannot Answer Your Lingering 'Amazing Spider-Man' Questions
Only a few years after release, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 have already begun to recede into the background. When someone gets around to writing that book about the history of modern superhero movies, they will probably feel more like footnotes that inform the existence of Tom Holland's Spider-Man than anything else.
But there is one person who will be fielding Spider-Man questions for the rest of his life and that person is Andrew Garfield, who played Peter Parker twice for director Marc Webb. Garfield has been very gracious about his time as Spidey and complimentary toward Holland's casting, but in a new interview, he implies what we've always suspected – the overall game plan for the Amazing Spider-Man movies was a little half-baked.
Remember the end of The Amazing Spider-Man, when Rhys Ifans' Dr. Curt Connors is visited in prison by a shadowy figure with a croaking voice and face that always manages to find a convenient shadow? Let this jog your memory:
This mysterious figure, who was hiding some kind of grand secret from Peter Parker and was involved in kind of larger conspiracy, was apparently Gustav Fiers, a character borrowed from a Spider-Man novel. Not a comic. A novel. He was also seen at the end of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, working with Harry Osborn to form the Sinister Six for a spin-off movie that never happened.
But as Andrew Garfield joked in an interview with CinemaBlend, the exact identity of this mysterious villain was unclear and yes, he's as in the dark as the rest of us:
I don't know that the filmmakers knew who the hell that guy was! [Laughs] I don't know, actually. I actually don't know. No. But the good news is that now none of us are ever going to find out, because that version of Spider-Man is no longer. Now we got Tom Holland, who I really think is going to do some beautiful stuff.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 remains a fascinating debacle, a film that almost had the audacity to bring Peter Parker's dead father back to life, a film that cast Chris Cooper as classic Spidey villain Norman Osborn and then cut him from the movie, a film that had a subplot involving Shailene Woodley as Mary Jane Watson that was excised from the final cut. It's a movie that doesn't feel made as much as it feel cobbled together, improvised by a studio who had no idea what to do with this character.
Of course, none of this blame should be directed at Garfield, a fine actor who did everything he could do with the material offered to him. He's now working with Martin Scorsese. Spider-Man is now rubbing shoulders with Iron Man. Everyone came out of this one okay.