Tom Holland has a major summer coming up with The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day both releasing in July. One’s a massive production from Christopher Nolan, fresh off his Oppenheimer Oscar triumphs and bringing Greek mythology to eye-popping IMAX. The other is the latest in Holland’s Spidey journey, which will see the webslinger facing a world where everyone’s undergone a mind-wipe and forgotten about him. As Holland was figuring out his schedule to work on both films, he also applied some lessons he’d learned from Nolan to his latest superhero stint.
Speaking to GQ, Holland talked about how his experience on The Odyssey translated into improvements on Brand New Day. The first step was approaching the latter film with a plan and a purpose already firmly in place.
“I was really able to lay down the law and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out. We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’”
Holland said that Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton “was super instrumental in that,” but the actor also said it was “really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.'”
Hopefully, fans will see the positive effects of Spider-Man: Brand New Day being carefully considered ahead of time rather than a project that was making changes on the fly. Because of The Odyssey, in fact, the Sony production had even more time to figure things out because Brand New Day actually shifted its schedule to accommodate its star’s desire to be in Nolan’s film.
And it all worked out, Holland said. “The Odyssey almost saved Spider-Man because we wouldn’t have had Destin. He wouldn’t have been ready to make the movie when we were ready to go. We wouldn’t have had the six-month period to develop the script with Destin to get it to a place where it is now. And I truly believe that we’ve made the best version of any Spider-Man movie going. So while [the delay] was a tough pill to swallow for Sony, I think in hindsight, they’re very grateful that it happened.”
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