Just a few days ago we were saying to The Amazing-Spider-Man franchise, “Whoah, buddy, slow down! You can’t just greenlight two more sequels when you haven’t finished your first one yet! Except I guess you can. I mean you just did. Just… stay safe, Amazing Spider-Man. There are people who care about you.”
Among those people are actress Shailene Woodley, tapped to play Mary Jane Watson in a small role in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but what everybody assumed would be a larger one come TASM 3, after the assumed death of Gwen Stacy. Woodley now says that she won’t be appearing in TASM 2 at all.
When we last heard from Woodley, she’d been spotted on the set of TASM 2, and her candid appearance was being dissected with widespread derision by jerks. But in an interview in the upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly, Woodley says we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for her to appear.
Of course I’m bummed. But I am a firm believer in everything happening for a specific reason… Based on the proposed plot, I completely understand the need for holding off on introducing [Mary Jane] until the next film.
While this change isn’t exactly last minute (the movie isn’t due for nearly a year), it’s still a bit odd to cut the part of an actress who’ll be one of your leads in the next film. With the way superhero movie contrast work these days, actors and actresses are pretty uniformly signed for multiple movies. Since she put in the work, presumably Woodley will get her paycheck, but if she doesn’t actually appear in the film, will it count? Coupled with the announcement of not just one but two sequels to TASM 2, what we could be seeing is something like we saw with The Hobbit last year: the stretching of a story arc over more movies than it was initially planned to be told in.
Or Marc Webb and Co. could have just made some changes to the script. Either way, don’t expect Woodley to show up until this time 2016.
(via Collider.)
