What The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Tells Us about Hollywood

Was The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a good movie? That question is up for debate, but in my opinion, it was a good movie. It had enough great moments to overcome its flaws, but I’m not here to review the film, I here to talk about something that troubled me during the movie. I here to talk about how Sony’s choices were this movie’s undoing.

While I was watching the movie I started to notice something that’s sadly all too familiar these days in the film industry. There were many great scenes in the movie that were ruined by the studio trying to throw in many plot points, so they could eventually make more movies to make more money. For every heartwarming scene with Peter and Gwen, there was a scene that was completely unnecessary. You could see Marc Webb trying to craft beautiful scenes, but you could also see Sony trying to throw pointless things into the movie to mess the beautiful scenes up. Gwen’s death in the movie was crafted perfectly by Marc Webb, but the scene was pointless because Green Goblin was thrown into the movie at the last minute.

This movie reveals Sony didn’t learn their lesson from Spider-Man 3. During the lead up to this movie the screenwriters kept saying this was going to be nothing like Spider-man 3, and they kept pounding in that fact that it was not overcrowded with villains. They were completely wrong. This movie would’ve been a masterpiece if the movie only had one central villain. What was the point of putting Rhino in this movie? Paul Giamatii is one of my favorite actors in Hollywood, but he could’ve been completely edited out. Rhino suddenly appearing in at the last part of the movie ruined the ending for me because it should’ve ended with Peter standing at Gwen’s grave, or him listening to Gwen’s graduation speech like he listened to Uncle Ben’s voicemail at the end of the first movie. If this movie would have cut out Electro and Rhino, and went with just the Green Goblin, it would have been one of the best superhero movies ever made because Dane Dehaan put on a good performance.

 I can’t talk about throwing in useless villains without talking about The Gentleman. He works better as someone who comes in at an end credit scene because the average moviegoer doesn’t know who that guy is. The average Spider-Man fan doesn’t even know the purpose he has in these movies. I’m not saying a superhero movie with more than one villain can’t succeed, but there is so much crap thrown into this movie, that it forgets about some of the things it set up in the first movie. What about Uncle Ben’s killer?

 What this movie tells us about Hollywood is that they care more about creating a huge franchise than putting out a good movie. That’s why I can’t bring myself to blame Marc Webb or the screenwriters for the flaws in this movie. This movie looks like Sony executives gave out hundreds of notes on the script, so they can increase the money they’re going to make in the future. The studio cared about money from future movies more than the actual quality of this movie, and the saddest part about that is every creative person involved in this movie tried to overcome that. When is Hollywood going to stop caring about franchises, and start caring about putting out the best product they can.
 
 

.