Spider-Man is successfully reinvented after No Way Home

By his own admission, following up the mammoth success of Spider-Man: No Way Home is something that might petrify most movie executives.

But Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has a blueprint for superhero films that extends through 2042, so that made the idea of pursuing a fourth Spidey movie easier to wrap his head around.

“No Way Home was a big success and it is very easy to be paralyzed by that kind of success,” Feige concedes in a video interview from New York City. “It’s a testament to this team that if we were paralyzed it only lasted a year or two, and then we got into what is the best new fresh story to tell.”

Now playing in theatres, Spider-Man: Brand New Day takes place four years after No Way Home and finds Tom Holland’s Peter Parker now a workaholic crimefighter anonymously protecting New York City.

With their memories of Peter scrubbed by Doctor Strange at the end of No Way Home, his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) don’t know who he is as he works in relative obscurity.

No Way Home earned close to $2 billion worldwide (it made $800 million in North America alone), so taking Spider-Man in a mature direction was a necessary step.

“The fact that we decided to make him anonymous at the end of No Way Home was a risky thing to do because it certainly was working. But what we wanted to do was put him back in that classic Spider-Man dilemma where nobody knows who he is and yet he still has to keep going,” longtime Spider-Man series producer Amy Pascal says.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who also helmed Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Brand New Day represents a continuation of Spider-Man stories on the big screen that goes back to 2002.

Pascal and Feige have been involved with the franchise from the start. Before the character joined Marvel’s ongoing cinematic universe in 2016 when Holland cameoed as the wallcrawler in Captain America: Civil War, Pascal produced the first five live-action Spider-Man movies that starred Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.

Sony, which owns the cinematic rights to the character, partnered with Marvel Studios to integrate Spidey alongside other Marvel heroes a decade ago.

“It happened because it was the right thing to do for Peter Parker,” Pascal now says.

Spider-Man movie veterans Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers pen the new instalment, which adds a smorgasbord of heroes to the mix, including Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Jon Bernthal as Punisher, as well as two notable surprises, one of whom is played by Stranger Things star Sadie Sink.

The body-hopping villain is the film’s biggest secret, but they’re unlike anything the webslinger has gone up against.

Below, Pascal and Feige spoke more about the challenge of turning Spider-Man into a crime-fighting loner and why Marvel no longer has a blueprint when it comes to planning its upcoming film slate.

Q We don’t know much about the villain. What kind of threat is Tom Holland’s Spider-Man up against?

Feige “The idea very early on was to put Spidey up against something he’d never been up against before. We wanted to go somewhere we haven’t gone before. The notion of Spidey being up against a villain that he can’t see and that he can’t necessarily fight was very intriguing. It was an idea that our writers brought to us early on. It took a long time to develop into the movie we made, but it was one of the early ideas: to put him up against a foe unlike any he’s faced before.”

Pascal “I think in the world that we live in now, we’re up against things that we don’t know and don’t understand and that we can’t see and can’t touch. They’re not tangible in the way that we have thought about villains, so being able to capture that is something we wanted to do.”

Q Tom has been playing the character for 10 years. But before that, Amy, you had your own Spider-Man movies going at Sony. Take me back to the decision to have Spider-Man join the MCU.

Pascal “Peter exists in a world of other characters, not just the ones in his own comics. That’s what gives him such rich opportunity. Kevin is a Spider-Man lover, as am I, and we made the decision and the companies backed us that this was going to be the right thing to do for a great future for Spider-Man.”

Q Kevin, the very first time we spoke in 2016 you told me the blueprint went until 2023 and here we are in 2026.

Feige “There’s no blueprint anymore. I don’t know how firm that blueprint was. The blueprint is always very loose because it needs to be because reality comes in every day and every week when you try to bring these stories to life. But they are very helpful to have as a guide. I told someone this the other day, and it’s ludicrous, but I’m going to tell you. There is a road map in one of our conference rooms at Marvel right that I just looked at on my way out the door to a meeting and it went until 2042.”

Q No Way Home was the last movie I saw before they shut the theatres down a second time because of the pandemic. Why does the theatrical experience matter?

Pascal “There is nothing like sitting in a dark room and having no control over what’s going to happen. I think we all think we want to know everything and all of the secrets, but in truth I don’t think we do. I think that the immersive, surprising and overwhelming experience of seeing a movie in a movie theatre, there’s nothing like it.”

Feige “It’s my favourite place in the world and it’s the reason I wanted to do this. The emotions and adrenalin and philosophical discoveries being made in a darkened theatre when I was a kid altered my DNA to want to do this. A good story, well told, in a giant theatre in the dark is the greatest form of entertainment and one of the most important forms of human interaction.”

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theatres.

mdaniell@postmedia.com