‘Amazing Spider-Man’ Director Marc Webb Reveals Wacky Plot for Scrapped Sequel
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Man directs acclaimed indie. Studio hires man to direct giant blockbuster franchise movie. Said movie is…not very good. Seemingly unimpeded by failure, man continues to direct movies, including a sequel to said blockbuster…which is also not very good. In this case, the man in question is Marc Webb, whose Amazing Spider-Man films were — despite fairly successful box office runs — decidedly un-amazing. His idea for the scrapped third film doesn’t sound that much better.
Webb had already come up with a story idea for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 before Sony nixed the sequel in favor of teaming up with Marvel to reboot the beloved superhero yet again (this time with more successful results). Back in 2015, the director revealed that the third film would have introduced Venom, and might have involved a plot in which Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker found a way to bring people back from the dead (yes, really). In a new interview with Den of Geek, Webb reveals some additional plot details for the discarded sequel, which would have also involved the Goblin and the mysterious man from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 post-credits scene — you know, the guy who was wearing a fedora, which is how you can tell he’s a bad guy:
Chris Cooper was going to come back and play the Goblin. We were going to freeze his head, and then he was going to be brought back to life. And then there was that character called The Gentleman…that was going to be the main villain. He was going to come out and lead the Sinister Six. We had talked about Vulture a little bit too, actually.
Drew Goddard was developing the Sinister Six spinoff, but that project was also scrapped in the wake of the infamous Sony hack, during which hundreds of internal corporate emails were made public. Those exchanges shed light on Sony’s plans for the Spider-Man universe, which were scattered and ambitiously misguided, at best. It’s easy to blame the studio in this scenario, but Webb takes full responsibility for the Amazing Spider-Man movies — though, looking back, he admits he might take different “approach” to some things:
I was never pushed around. A lot of smart people had a lot of strong opinions about things, but it was my movie.
I think it was a very difficult time for Sony because of the hack and because Marvel wanted the character back…but that didn’t have a huge impact on how we made the movie. Maybe it accelerated the timeline, which made things difficult, but that’s something I accepted.
Webb has since returned to directing more intimate projects and has two films out this year: The Chris Evans drama Gifted, which was released in April, and The Only Living Boy in New York, which stars Kiersey Clemons and Kate Beckinsale and hits theaters this Friday.