After nearly a decade of making Spider-Man movies together, Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon have been through plenty of Marvel’s massive machinery. But even with three previous films behind them, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” apparently kept changing under their feet, both while they were shooting and long after production wrapped.
The fourth Holland-led Spider-Man film went through multiple edits before release, including one version shaped extensively by audience feedback. The filmmakers tried incorporating those notes into the movie, Holland says, only for the three returning stars to watch the resulting cut and hate it.
“What’s really interesting is we’ve seen loads of different cuts of this movie,” Holland told Quotable. “And one of the cuts was they took all of the notes from all of the random people that saw the film, and they changed the movie, and then we watched it, and we hated it.”
“It, like, totally didn’t work,” he continued, “and it’s what the people were asking for, but it wasn’t quite what we wanted as the creatives. But they learned lessons from that experience. So a movie can change in a thousand different ways in the edit room.”
Holland didn’t detail what the audience wanted changed or how dramatically that version differed from the finished film. But he described the uncertainty of surrendering a movie to the editing process after shooting, particularly on something as large as Spider-Man.
“These movies evolve so much between wrapping photography and coming out in the theater, you know, so there’s a lot of unknowns as actors,” Holland said. “And that’s why it’s so important that we trust the filmmakers, because once we’re done on set, it’s now down to them.”
And apparently plenty changed before “Brand New Day” ever reached the editing room. Holland specifically pointed to Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, whose dynamic with Peter Parker evolved once the longtime friends actually began working together.
“A great example is Jon Bernthal and I, who plays the Punisher, is making his, you know, cinematic debut in this movie,” Holland said. “And what was on the page is very different to what is in the film.”
Holland said some of the character material had been developed before Bernthal arrived, but director Destin Daniel Cretton saw another possibility once the two actors started improvising.
“We developed a lot of the character stuff before Jon arrived because he was away doing something else,” Holland explained. “And when we got to set, and we started improvising and the director, Destin Daniel Cretton, kind of saw my relationship with Jon, because we’ve been friends since before I knew these guys, just, you know, we were having so much fun and it really dictated how those two characters interacted on screen.”
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” opens in theaters on Friday, July 31. Watch the full interview below.
