Tom Holland has seen a lot of versions of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. One of them he did not like at all.
In an interview with Quotable released Wednesday, Holland said the team had watched "loads of different cuts of this movie," including one built almost entirely around audience feedback from early test screenings. That version did not go over well with the people who made it.
"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," Holland recalled. "And then, we watched it and we hated it."
He described what went wrong with that version plainly. "It like, totally didn't work. 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."
Holland spent time in the writers' room helping to shape the film's story, which may explain why seeing the test-note-driven cut landed so hard. He framed the experience as a normal part of filmmaking, adding that "a movie can change in a thousand different ways in the edit room."
The final cut appears to have landed where the filmmakers wanted it. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has drawn strong reviews ahead of its July 31 theatrical release. The Wrap's William Bibbiani called it "a fantastic film about Peter Parker and his ongoing, often disastrous attempts to be a good person, no matter how much it hurts him personally." Bibbiani also wrote that it is "even a fantastic movie about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which other superheroes and supervillains show up, contribute to the story and meaningfully relate to its themes, but never outstay their welcome or hog the spotlight," and described it as one of "the highlights of the whole franchise."
The film is also expected to post one of the biggest box office opening weekends of all time when it opens Thursday night.
