Remember The Amazing Spider-Man series? Yeah, we're trying to forget about it too. Prior to Marvel stepping in and taking over the creative side of the Spider-Man films in 2015, Sony had been planning out their own little Spider-Man cinematic universe. The studio was keen on setting up tons of sequels and spin-offs that they sort of forgot to make solid movies with stories that stand on their own.
The movies bombed critically and financially leaving Sony to reboot Spidey yet again but this time they decided to let Marvel finally include the webhead in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It has worked out really well so far with Spidey's latest film being one of the highest rated movies of 2017 but… we almost never got that.
If Sony had moved forward with The Amazing Spider-Man 3, things would have been very different and not in a good way at all. Speaking in an interview with Den of Geek, director Marc Webb stated that they were going to bring back Chris Cooper as the Green Goblin. For those that forgot, Cooper was in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as Norman Osborn for about 5 minutes or so before they killed him off. There's a moment where you can see a container being moved into his bedroom so they can collect his head and freeze it in the basement of Oscorp a la Walt Disney (allegedly).
“Yeah, we were talking about the Sinister Six. They were going to make a Sinister Six movie before we did the third one. But I wanted…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. We had some notions about how to do it, but I think maybe we were thinking too far ahead when we started building in those things. But it was a fun exercise. I look back very fondly on those days."
Not only is this just incredibly strange from a story perspective but we also saw Green Goblin shoehorned into the end of the second film. This isn't the first time that we've heard of people being potentially brought back from the dead in the third film either.
Denis Leary previously revealed that they were talking about reviving Captain Stacy and even Peter Parker's deceased girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. We won't go into why this would've been a bad idea because it's probably obvious but it would have certainly been ambitious.
Webb also reflected on the film and said that he took full responsibility for them. Some believe Sony pushed Webb around so that it would align with their vision and while Webb isn't going to say whether that's true, he says he would take more time with them if he could do it again.
“I think I’d just take more time making those movies. But that goes into accepting, when you sign up for it, making clear what you’re willing to accept. I didn’t know how to build a movie like that when I was starting off. So I think I’d be more careful about that now.”
On the other side of things, Andrew Garfield is glad that he was able to walk away from the role as it gave him the chance to take on other great roles.
Sony is still planning to expand on the Spider-Man mythos, it just won't really have the web-slinger in those movies. Plans have seemingly been scrapped for a Sinister Six film but Sony is moving ahead with an R-rated Venom movie that is set to release next October.
