How About That Amazing Spider-Man Director's Cut Now?

In the hours and days after it became clear that Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield's Amazing [...]

By Russ Burlingame

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In the hours and days after it became clear that Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield's Amazing Spider-Man 3 was never going to happen, there was a joke making the rounds on social media...

...And while the tweets were pretty much all looking down their nose at the time "wasted" on developing the plot that revolved around Peter's parents, there is a bit of a bittersweet element to it.

After all, these movies made more than a billion dollars globally combined, with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 making just $6 million less than the second Captain America movie, which is universally regarded as a big hit for Marvel.

People saw these movies.

And, on the whole, more people liked them than didn't. The Amazing Spider-Man was Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with 73% of critics and 77% of audiences giving it positive marks. The second film did 53% and 67%, respectively.

The point being that while the franchise was flawed -- the second one very deeply so -- there were a lot of people invested in the movies.

What's the point of all this? 

Well, the "mystery" of Peter Parker's parents is a contrivance to separate The Amazing Spider-Man from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. Arguably, it's a necessary one, since audiences and critics alike criticized the fact that they went back to formula with an origin story.

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It was also a key point of the film's promotion.

Again, likely hoping to distance itself from the Raimi films, The Amazing Spider-Man's earliest promotion centered on "the untold story" and early rumors came that the death of Peter Parker's parents would be that story. Given the backstory they had from the comics, many fans could see the writing on the wall long before Peter started to climb it.

There's an argument to be made -- and recently Savage Dragon creator and former Spider-Man writer and artist Erik Larsen made it -- that the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent parents don't really fit Peter Parker's "everyman" backstory.

"Once you make his parents spies--he's no longer an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances," Larsen tweeted back in January.

Nevertheless, it seemed poised to be a key part of the first film...until it wasn't.

It was pretty clear from some of the film's disjointed editing and the dozen or so scenes shown during the promotional run-up to Amazing that never made the film, something had changed. And what was it?

Well, the rumor was that Sony liked the movie so much they insisted on reworking it to be a trilogy. In true Spider-Man fashion (apparently these guys have never heard of the Clone Saga), they insisted that the subplot involving his parents be stretched out to last the three films rather than getting resolution in The Amazing Spider-Man.

This has never been explicitly confirmed by Webb, but it makes sense; he owed 20th Century Fox a movie as part of his (500) Days of Summer contract and when Sony wanted to bring him back for the second Amazing film, they had to make a deal with Fox to make it happen. This resulted, in part, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 carrying a mid-credits scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past. It isn't a stretch, then, to assume that he had planned to get out after one movie at first.

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Shortly after the film's release, Badass Digest took the time to detail all the various elements that were teased in the run-up to the film and then not capitalized on in The Amazing Spider-Man, supposing that there was a director's cut -- or at least a lot of unused footage -- that could have made the movie very different.

It was that report that first popularized the theory that the film had undergone radical changes late in the process, based in part on the fact that aspects of the "untold story" -- that Peter was genetically "special" and that the Spider-bite didn't transform him but merely activated his existing potential.

"It seems to me obvious that The Amazing Spider-Man got a huge last minute recut," that report claimed. "Marketing was still using concepts and imagery related to a completely deleted storyline - the 'Untold Story' - as recently as May. This fits in with rumors I heard that a spring screening for Sony execs went poorly and changes were made. Excising the 'Untold Story' seems to have been the brunt of that change."

While the first movie had some very vocal critics, it was generally warmly-received and so there was little controversy around these moves. The speculation that it had been done to drag out Peter's backstory over the course of three films seemed logical enough  and the movie's financial success, coupled with the history of the property and the popularity of superhero films at the moment, suggested there wouldn't be a problem getting a third one made.

A similar conversation about deleted scenes and abandoned narratives happened around the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the rumors that Webb had a "better" director's cut became pervasive enough that there was a Change.org petition to release said director's cut commercially.

That petition, which had a little over 10,000 signatures, didn't yield any kind of official response that I'm aware of. It's likely that by the time Amazing 2 was a bona fide disappointment, Sony was already trying to figure out how to back slowly away from the poker table without losing everything they had in place for the future. After all, if arguably the biggest mistake the films made was being too preoccupied with franchise building and not focused enough on telling a good, stand-alone story...it would be pretty terrible if the resultant flaws kept the franchise in question from ever materializing, right?

This is likely why we still have talk of a Sinister Six movie, Venom and the rest even though the conventional wisdom is that Amazing and everything that comes with it are now history. Sony committed a lot of resources to the idea, and even with a disappointing box office like Amazing Spider-Man 2's, Spidey remains one of Sony's biggest and most reliable tentpoles.

...But what about some closure for Amazing? Will we ever see a cut of the first pair of movies that present Webb's vision?

Probably not soon.

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At present, it seems Sony is looking to distance themselves from what's considered a pretty huge disappointment, and Marvel have reportedly never been too keen on the rebooted franchise. So you've already got that working against you.

And bear in mind that other major tentpole movies that underwent huge story changes during prodcution or post-production  have had a hard time bringing their original visions to an audience. Yeah, Superman II and the Donner Cut are a rare success story...but the other side of that is The Incredible Hulk, where Marvel's theatrical cut is it.

Raimi's acclaimed Spider-Man 2 got an expanded DVD release as Spider-Man 2.1, replacing a few deleted scenes here and there...but that was ahead of the theatrical release of Spider-Man 3, so there was a specific reason to revisit and promote the franchise's most popular installment. Also, the restorations made to 2.1 didn't result in a materially different movie than Spider-Man 2, just a longer movie that flowed marginally better, with a few action and comedy beats that got trimmed for time in the original movie.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is likely not salvageable, at least in the eyes of many fans. It's doubtful that a remastered edition would make much money on home video unless it was leaked to the specialty press early and got downright ecstatic reviews (see also: Daredevil's director's cut). The Amazing Spider-Man -- especially if they could bring some real closure to the Untold Story stuff rather than just progressing it toward a prospective third movie that will never happen -- might be somewhat more salvageable, although waiting until closer to the 2017 release of the next Spidey flick might be the best way to ensure a larger audience.

There's also the larger question of whether enough footage exists to satisfactorily do it. Even if the original draft had more of a resolution, the Badass Digest version of the story -- that the subplot was scrapped after a poor test screening with executives -- would yield a very different result than the official line that they expanded the plot after Sony fell in love with Webb's vision. The former, for starters, might suggest that the scenes in question were never fully completed and that they exist only in a pre-visual effects form. That means completing them would significantly increase the cost of preparing a commercial release and might be an insurmountable barrier to getting a director's cut made.

Webb, meanwhile, remains an in-demand filmmaker and might not be willing or even able to take time out of his filming schedule to prep an extended cut of one of his old failures for a home video-only release.

Would it be good to see Sony at least try to salvage the franchise and give the fans who enjoyed Amazing a chance at closure? Sure. Will we see it? Well...stranger things have happened, but don't go counting your Lizard eggs before they're hatched.

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