Boxoffice - July 2019

COVER STORY
HOCUS POCUS
Jake Gyllenhaal as
classic comics character
Quentin Beck, otherwise
known as the master of
illusion, Mysterio
The franchise had been introduced and reintroduced
to the point of self-parody. It was on autopilot:
great power, great responsibility, green goblins, and
assorted love interests. A new Spider-Man needed
someone to save the franchise from the Spider-Men
who preceded it. True to its source material, that
hero would turn out to be a young underdog who
stepped up when given the opportunity.
Jon Watts, a director of small-budget projects
and practically unknown in Hollywood before
the critical success of his indie thriller Cop Car in
2015, suddenly found himself taking the reins of
one of the most recognizable superhero franchises
in the world.
“It was pretty thrilling. I was able to use a lot of
my personal emotions to inform the story,” Watts
tells Boxoffice. “Spider-Man: Homecoming is about
a kid who wants to prove himself and no one will
listen to him.”
The director lets out a nervous laugh before adding,
“When he finally gets the chance to step up, he
completely screws up.”
Watts is referring to a memorable scene in
Homecoming, in which his Spider-Man (played by
Tom Holland) takes the initiative to save passengers
from a disintegrating Staten Island Ferry—only to
fail spectacularly and force Iron Man to bail him
out at the last minute.
“Those were the kind of nerves I had about
jumping from something as small as Cop Car to
something as big as Homecoming,” he says. “I really
wanted to prove myself and show that I could make
a movie like this, but I had this terrible fear that I
would somehow accidentally screw things up and
split the Staten Island Ferry in half. I took a lot of
those emotions and translated them into something
I could use for the movie.”
Those feelings helped give Spider-Man: Homecoming
(2017) a grounded quality, giving equal
weight to the protagonist’s anxieties about high
school life and his role as an emerging hero. The
movie was hailed as a welcome, and overdue, return
to form for the superhero franchise. It went on to
earn $334 domestically and $880 million worldwide,
the highest-grossing entry in the series since
Raimi’s trilogy.
“One of the beneficial things of there having
been so many previous Spider-Man films is that
it limited some of the things you could do,” says
Watts, when asked about his approach to the film’s
tone. “Once we made the rule that we didn’t want
to show anything that we had already seen before,
it really helped us eliminate a lot of extraneous
ideas, concepts, visuals, and story points. It made us
30 JULY 2019