THE AMAZING
SPIDER-MAN 2.

A SEQUEL WITH A SLATE ATTACHED

HOW SONY TURNED A SEQUEL INTO THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A UNIVERSE

Nearly five months before the film opened, Sony announced that it was building a shared Spider-Man universe. In December 2013 the studio named a “franchise brain trust” of writers, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, Ed Solomon and Drew Goddard, who would work with producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach and director Marc Webb. The plan came with assignments and a first release date. Kurtzman, Orci and Pinkner were writing The Amazing Spider-Man 3 for June 2016. Kurtzman would direct a Venom film, and Goddard would write The Sinister Six with an eye to directing. Deadline read the move as a way to protect a billion-dollar franchise from reverting to Marvel.

The sequel itself was a rewrite. Tolmach and Arad scrapped James Vanderbilt’s sequel draft before the first film reached theaters. Tolmach was blunt about the reason: “We needed a great script.” The job went to Kurtzman, Orci and Pinkner, who are credited with the screenplay, and Vanderbilt shares the screen-story credit. Tolmach said that each film in the plan would have “its own color, shape, and tone,” with Spider-Man the one thing they preserved.

A VILLAIN COUNT THAT DREW AN EARLY COMPARISON

WHY THE FILM WAS CALLED CROWDED, AND WHAT WEBB SAID BEFORE CRITICS DID

Jamie Foxx played Electro, Dane DeHaan played Harry Osborn, who becomes the Green Goblin, and Paul Giamatti played the Rhino. By March 2014 fans were already comparing the villain count to Spider-Man 3, and Webb answered the point at a SXSW panel.

“The main villain is Electro. Every other villain emerges around that.”

Marc Webb, on the Spider-Man 3 comparison at SXSW in March 2014

Webb added that the Rhino is in the film for four minutes. Critics were not persuaded: the Rotten Tomatoes consensus faults the film’s “unfocused narrative and an overabundance of characters.” The film also lost a character. Shailene Woodley shot scenes as Mary Jane Watson that did not make the final cut, and Pinkner said: “It was our mistake to try and introduce Mary Jane too early.” Webb said a second love interest would have tarnished “the sacred sort of bond” between Peter and Gwen.

A COMICS STORY FROM 1973, PLANNED FROM THE FIRST FILM

HOW GWEN STACY’S FALL WAS DECIDED, STAGED AND ADJUSTED

The scene follows Amazing Spider-Man #121, the 1973 issue by writer Gerry Conway, and Webb has said the team knew the ending before cameras rolled on the first film. Asked when the team decided to kill Gwen, he answered “from the beginning of the first movie.” Asked whether Stone’s performance prompted second thoughts, he said there was “a lot of lamenting, but there was never really a question about it,” because the team had built the entire movie around that event. He placed the fight in a clock tower because he saw the film’s theme as time, and staged it so that the wheels of the clock, not the Goblin, cut Peter’s web.

The scene was adjusted along the way. In the original version Gwen did not hit the ground after Peter webbed her. Webb said people who watched it read the web as salvation and would not accept that she had died, so he added a moment of visible impact.

A BAND INSTEAD OF AN ORCHESTRA

HOW HANS ZIMMER BUILT A SPIDER-MAN SCORE AROUND A BAND

Hans Zimmer scored the film with a band instead of an orchestra, a group he called the Magnificent 6 that included guitarist Johnny Marr, Pharrell Williams and Junkie XL. Webb has described Zimmer’s approach to Electro’s theme as a surprise. Rather than the electronic sound Webb had expected, Zimmer played him a 17th-century aria about a cold demon being summoned from the winter, and connected its shivering cadence to the sensation of electrocution. Webb has said he wanted the theme to be powerful enough to impress electronic music producers with its originality.

THE REWATCH

THE LOWEST WORLDWIDE GROSS OF THE FIVE FILMS, AND THE MARVEL DEAL THAT FOLLOWED

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opened to $91.6 million domestically and finished with $203.6 million in the US and $716.9 million worldwide. Those totals include a 2024 re-release; the original 2014 run took $709.0 million worldwide. That is the lowest worldwide total of the five Spider-Man films Sony had released, below The Amazing Spider-Man’s $758.7 million and Spider-Man 2’s $788.3 million. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 50% critics’ score from 317 reviews. Metacritic’s Metascore is 53 from 50 critic reviews.

The order of events matters here. Sony’s emails leaked during the studio’s late-2014 hacking crisis, and they confirmed earlier Marvel talks that had seemingly broken down in the fall. On February 9, 2015, Sony and Marvel announced that Kevin Feige would produce the next Spider-Man film with Amy Pascal, that the character would first appear in a Marvel film, and that Sony would keep financing, distribution, ownership and final creative control. The next day, The Amazing Spider-Man 3 was reported to have been cancelled, with Andrew Garfield no longer playing the role, while Sinister Six and Venom were still moving forward at that point. Webb said in 2017 that the films “weren’t disasters” and that he “didn’t have an adversarial relationship with the studio, at all.”

For a first watch, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and in the Spider-Man movies in order guide directly after The Amazing Spider-Man, with Captain America: Civil War next on that route.