Sony’s handling of Spider-Man was rightly called into question by a lot of fans after the studio had been directly responsible for watching two separate franchises implode long before they were supposed to, something that really stung for a lot of fans as they watched the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfold concurrently.
Iron Man was released a year after Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, but the filmmaker’s plans for a fourth installment ultimately fell by the wayside. The Amazing Spider-Man duology saw Sony begin to lay the foundations for an entire shared Marvel mythology of their own, but after Andrew Garfield’s sequel became the lowest-grossing and worst-reviewed Spidey movie ever, development was halted on a multitude of additional projects.
Luckily, Kevin Feige was there to step in and save the day, partnering up with Sony to reboot the role once again with Tom Holland, and it would be fair to say that it’s all worked out pretty well in the end. However, the architect of the MCU admitted in an interview with Sony that he was under immense pressure to get things right.
“When I met with Amy Pascal and first approached her about joining forces to do a Spider-Man movie together and set him in the MCU and when we got her blessing and the blessing of Sony and Tom Rothman came on board and believed in it, there was a lot of pressure, right? It’s one thing getting people to say yes, it’s another thing now delivering on what the heck you were talking about.
And the first step on that is casting, and is saying, ‘Okay let’s find the youngest, Peter Parker who we can grow with and who can do scenes with these other Marvel heroes for the first time’. We knew that Tony Stark was going to be a big part of that, and Civil War was already shooting at the time, and we weren’t sure we were going to be able to cast Peter Parker and include him in the initial round of photography on Civil War, but we wanted to make every effort to do that.”
The MCU has rarely if ever let audiences down, so most folks were supremely confident going in that the third iteration of Spider-Man to hit the big screen in less than a decade would justify its own existence, which it certainly did and then some.
