The critical and popular consensus on this summer's Amazing Spider-Man 2 was that it was, to put it diplomatically, underwhelming.

As The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern put it, the movie felt overstuffed and "like a setup film for The Sinister Six spin-off." In fact, he put it that way directly to actor Andrew Garfield, who has played Peter Parker in the last two Spidey flicks. Garfield defended the movie to a point, but he also laid any blame for its failures solely on the studio behind it, Sony.

Here's the key quote:

Certain people at the studio had problems with certain parts of it, and ultimately the studio is the final say in those movies because they’re the tentpoles, so you have to answer to those people.

Garfield said he "genuinely loved" the original script to Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, but studio suits kept removing pieces, ruining the flow of the story. He added:

I got to work in deep scenes that you don’t usually see in comic book movies, and I got to explore this orphan boy—a lot of which was taken out, and which we’d explored more.

Blaming the studio for what's ultimately a mediocre movie is nothing new; it's something directors do a lot, but presumably Garfield is coming back for the next Amazing Spider-Man movie, and he's got to work with these studio guys again. He's sticking his neck out a bit.

At Badass Digest, Devin Faraci pinpoints the blame even further, putting it on Spider-movie uber-producer Avi Arad:

It's interesting that he doesn't talk about Avi Arad, who is largely accepted to be the problem with the Spider-Man movies at this point; I'm sure Sony being all freaked out and not knowing what the hell to do with the property didn't help, but everyone I talk to keeps bringing up Arad's name. Again and again.

That's some harsh talk about the man who brought us the X-Men animated series. Harsh talk indeed.

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