Director Marc Webb discusses the controversial ending to THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

We’re about to discuss a certain scene in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. You might not want to go any further. Guys, I’m super-cereal. Don’t hit the jump link.

 

We have no spoilers. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

 

 

Did your “spoiler jam” have anything to do with, I don’t know, being shot at by machine guns?

 

 

I do some spoiler design.

 

 

You wanna know how powerful I am? Well, I wanna know too. I’m Spoilertro!

 

 

We have spoilers for you, Peter Parker.

 

 

Alright, now that you’re sufficiently warned, you’ve probably surmised that we’re talking about the death of Gwen Stacy. It was only a matter of time until Emma Stone’s character pegged, with comic book fans smirking like a Game of Thrones reader whenever the red wedding was mentioned last year. And genuinely, it was shocking to see her die. Director Marc Webb nailed that death perfectly. And yet, it felt wasted in a terrible debut of Dane DeHaan’s Green Goblin. Well executed, but clumsily slotted in for the sake of having some sort of death present in the film.

Speaking to SuperHeroHype (via ComingSoon), Webb brushed off the idea of Stacy dying a few weeks back during a press junket. “Do we have to? Why are you so violent? You have such blood lust! Yeah, it’s an extraordinary thing the dynamic between Peter and Gwen and you know, we’ll have to see what happens,” Webb said.

Gwen Stacy died all the way back in Amazing Spider-Man 121, published way back in 1975. Back then, readers flipped the frig out when it happened, something that Webb was aware of:

It’s a controversial thing in the comic, certainly. People flipped the f*ck out, but it also ushered in a new era of comics. It changed Spider-Man but it changed all of comics because people took it seriously. It’s like ‘Game of Thrones.’ When somebody pulls out a blade, you’re like, ‘I don’t know what the f*ck’s going to happen.’ And that’s important, that kind of drama. It’s important that actions have consequences. I think that it’s easy to lose track of the idea that these people are dealing with really dangerous elements of the universe.

But make no mistake, Webb knew that Stacy would have to die, and he wanted to play it as close to the comics as possible:

We were very careful to adhere to that. I think in this movie, we reverse engineered everything from that event. We knew that the Goblin had to do it, but who the Goblin was, I think we had some leeway because there was a precedent in the comics that Harry actually did turn into the Goblin, but we wanted to kind of withhold that. We knew if we just made him the only villain, the cat would’ve been out of the bag.

Comic book fans will pick up several cues from that death scene. Stacy is wearing the exact same outfit in that scene, that she wore in her comic book death. When the clock stops around her, you can also see it spell 121, which ties in further to the comic book issue. Throw in the Goblin element and Peter webbing her too late, and it’s a clear homage to that moment. But like I said earlier, it’s a perfectly filmed scene, but one that should have been saved for later. What do you reckon?

Last Updated: May 6, 2014