Director and veteran screenwriter Drew Goddard is back on the promotional tour thanks to his work on the hit sci-fi film “Project Hail Mary,” and that success has hit a new level as the buzzy film has crossed the $300 million-dollar mark at the global box office after two weekends in theaters. In a new interview, Goddard dished about a slew of previous projects, including ones that got away, like his unmade “Spider-Man” spinoff film “The Sinister Six” and briefly touched upon his reasoning for wanting to do “The Matrix 5.”
The Oscar-nominated writer recently sat down with Josh Horowitz for a career exploration interview for the podcast “Happy Sad Confused,” where he reiterated that his plan with “The Sinister Six” was to make a film that felt like a “summer annual issue” of a comic book that plucked the hero into a standalone story that wasn’t your normal serialized story. And that they were “swinging for the fences” with it.
“What I thought of it was a Summer Annual, I don’t know if you’re a comic book reader…I felt comic book [movies] became very much about this serialized story. The movies became so much about, like, well, this movie is just about somebody gets a jewel to get to the next thing, and it worked really well. But I felt like what I really liked about Summer Annuals in the comic book world is that you had the serialized story, and then every summer there would be a giant-sized issue that had NOTHING to do with the serialized story. Where the main character usually got yanked out of the normal life and thrown into an insane situation. And that’s what I wanted to do with Spider-Man, I just felt like that would be fun, and let’s sort of throw all the things that I love about Spider-Man in there, and [Sony/producers] let me do it.”
We already know that Goddard had planned on using Andrew Garfield‘s Spider-Man in the film, until the movie was unplugged by Sony in the wake of the North Korean hacks and a push by the main ownership in Japan to make a development deal with Marvel Studios/Kevin Feige for a reboot that led to the casting of Tom Holland and billion-dollar installments. Although he suggests to Horowitz, after naming the lineup of baddies expected to appear in the movie (Doc Ock, Kraven, Mysterio) teased by Sony in “Amazing Spider-Man 2,” it might not have been that exact group in his finalized version.
Goddard is also being upfront that they’re still in “the writing cave” with “The Matrix 5,” figuring out ideas for the fifth installment, but says that the “existential questions” of the other films from the franchise and other moving emotional moments from other films from The Wachowskis‘ like “Cloud Atlas,” which could end up informing his take without going into any great detail on what he plans to do with that cyberpunk universe.
We have to assume that with the success of “Project Hail Mary,” as with other cultural landmark films like “The Martian” and his horror satire “Cabin In The Woods,” even more studio opportunities will present themselves to Drew Goddard in the near future.
Watch or listen to that full exchange between Goddard and Horowitz below.
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
