Andrew Garfield Responds to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Negative Reaction

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 divided fans and critics when it came out in May, and many of the reviews skewed toward the negative side. In some cases, people just flat out hated this movie. Now, star Andrew Garfield has addressed those criticisms in detail.

The actor spoke to The Daily Beast at the Toronto Film Festival to promote his new movie 99 Homes, and the site asked him how he felt about the reaction.

"It's interesting. I read a lot of the reactions from people and I had to stop because I could feel I was getting away from how I actually felt about it. For me, I read the script that Alex [Kurtzman] and Bob [Orci] wrote, and I genuinely loved it. There was this thread running through it," he said. "I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it-because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related. Once you start removing things and saying, 'No, that doesn't work,' then the thread is broken, and it's hard to go with the flow of the story. Certain people at the studio had problems with certain parts of it, and ultimately the studio is the final say in those movies because they're the tentpoles, so you have to answer to those people."

Garfield is a genuine fan of the Spider-Man character and has done right by him in his performances, so it's not really a surprise to learn that studio interference caused a lot of the issues. "But I'll tell you this," Garfield added. "Talking about the experience as opposed to how it was perceived, I got to work in deep scenes that you don't usually see in comic book movies, and I got to explore this orphan boy-a lot of which was taken out, and which we'd explored more. It's interesting to do a postmortem. I'm proud of a lot of it and had a good time, and was a bit taken aback by the response."

The site asked Garfield to elaborate on that last portion. "It's a discernment thing," he said. "What are the people actually saying? What's underneath the complaint, and how can we learn from that? We can't go, 'Oh God, we f*cked up because all these people are saying all these things. It's sh*t.' We have to ask ourselves, 'What do we believe to be true?' Is it that this is the fifth Spider-Man movie in however many years, and there's a bit of fatigue? Is it that there was too much in there? Is it that it didn't link? If it linked seamlessly, would that be too much? Were there tonal issues? What is it? I think all that is valuable. Constructive criticism is different from people just being dicks, and I love constructive criticism. Hopefully, we can get underneath what the criticism was about, and if we missed anything."

What do you think of Garfield's response? Let us know in the comments section.