When it first came out, The Amazing Spider-Man was almost universally hailed as “okay,” if unnecessary, what with the first trilogy having ended only five years prior. Then The Amazing Spider-Man 2 came out and showed everyone what a movie that doesn’t need to exist really looks like. And despite some good elements (Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone’s acting), after its release the studio decided The Amazing Spider-Man 2 contained too much of the not-good stuff (e.g. those nagging “plot” and “story” aspects) and put the franchise on hold.
Director Marc Webb recently talked about his plans for the villains in the third movie, had it gone forward, and that already sounded overstuffed. But now Denis Leary has opened up in an interview with IGN about some of the ideas that were in store for the next installment, and guess what? We all dodged a Spider-bullet (patent pending), because frankly, it sounds ridiculous:
I was disappointed because I’m totally selfish and greedy… I came back briefly in two and possibly in [The Amazing Spider-Man] 3, there was this idea at one point that Spider-Man would be able to take this formula and regenerate the people in his life that had died. So, there was this discussion that Captain Stacy would come back even bigger in episode 3. And I was like, lets go!
Why stop at bringing back Captain Stacy? Why not turn back the clock on [spoiler?] Gwen Stacy’s death as well, eliminating the need for emotional stakes altogether? Or hell, bring back good old Uncle Ben, thereby negating Spider-Man’s entire origin story. Maybe he could regenerate JFK, too.
To be fair, much as Sam Raimi can’t really be faulted for the studio shoehorning Venom into his third film, most of this is probably outside Webb’s control, who did his best with what he was given. (In the same interview, Leary lavishes praise on the director, pointing out that it’s basically unheard of for these massive projects to allow the kind of improvisational on-set style that Webb brought to the dialogue scenes.) Nonetheless, Webb should be thrilled he wasn’t saddled with the next installment, because Amazing Spider-Man 3: Return Of The Living Dead would 100 percent have been a real shit show.