Boxoffice - July 2019

COVER STORY
JON WATTS AT THE MOVIES
Moviegoing Memory
ish in Endgame. “After everything that he’s been
through, it was clear to us that Peter Parker needed
a vacation. That was the jumping off point for this
movie,” says Watts.
The movie sends Peter Parker on a European
field trip with his classmates, visiting famous
locales throughout the continent, an idea that was
partially inspired by Watts and Holland’s international
press tour for Homecoming. “We were going
from one European city to another promoting the
film with a Spider-Man costume for photo ops. I
remember standing up on a rooftop in Rome, doing
an interview and looking across the
I went and saw Todd Solondz’s Happiness at my
hometown theater, Kimball’s Peak Three Theater
in Colorado Springs. I’m amazed they played the
film there; I saw it in a packed movie theater
with people who did not know what to expect.
People were screaming at the screen, leaving
the theater. It was the most nervous laughter
I’ve ever heard.
room and seeing Spider-Man
on a red-tiled roof thinking, that’s
pretty cool—we should work this into a movie,”
says the director. “The idea of getting Peter Parker
out of New York and taking him on a European
class trip immediately opened up the possibilities
of interesting visuals and unique story points that
haven’t been explored before.”
It was also a good excuse to get out of the
Atlanta soundstages and shoot on location. Watts
says his team shot on location in cities like London,
Prague, and especially Venice. “Venice isn’t
that big; a big part of our scouting plan ahead of
going was to watch movies like Don’t Look Now
and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade so we could
plot locations out on maps and shoot the city in
new ways,” says Watts. “What’s amazing about
Venice is that everything looks great; you’re not
fighting against any bad angles. Everything there
looks like it belongs on a postcard.”
No superhero film is complete without its share
of recognizable villains, but Watts insisted in taking
a slight detour from that formula in Far from
Home. The trailer introduces Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal),
a classic bad guy from the comics making
his first appearance in a Spider-Man film. Watts
insists Mysterio has been reimagined as an antihero
in Far from Home, bringing to mind Sony’s
approach to its recent Spider-Man spin-off, Venom
(2018), though he refused to go into further detail
about the character, saying he’s excited to have
moviegoers find out more when they see the film.
The main villains presented in the movie’s trailers
are a bit obscure for casual comic book fans. The
Elementals, a group of extradimensional creatures
with unique powers, are taking top billing at the
moment as the movie’s primary antagonists. Watts
relished the opportunity to bring these characters
to the screen. “These are second- and third-tier
Spider-Man villains that we never really see outside
the Saturday-morning cartoons,” he says. “Those
were my favorite villains when I would watch
‘Spider-Man’ on Saturday mornings as a kid. It was
a chance to bring a different kind of spectacle to
this movie.”
Spectacle, after all, is at the heart of the franchise.
Despite coming from the independent-film
world, Watts has always had the theatrical experience
in mind when making films. It applied to Cop
Car as much as it does to his Spider-Man films. “I
only think of my movies as a theatrical experience,”
he says. “A big movie like this is a ride the audience
takes in a darkened theater with popcorn and a
soda. That’s the only way I think of it, not about
people watching it at home or on their phones.
It’s something you have to see in a theater. That’s
always in the back of my mind, and it informs
every decision you take on set. You want to lean in
to the sort of experiences that you can only have in
a theater with a captive audience.”
That focus on the theatrical experience has
paid off. Since Spider-Man’s nadir on Broadway,
Sony has successfully resurrected the franchise
with Watts’s films and a series of spin-offs like the
aforementioned Venom and the Academy Award–
winning animated feature Spider-Man: Into the
Spider-Verse (2018). Eight years after Spider-Man’s
disastrous Broadway debut, the question is no
longer about why there should be another Spider-Man,
but where the iconic superhero franchise
will go next.
32 JULY 2019