If there’s one man who can be credited for the great success of Marvel superheroes at the movies over the past 15 years, it’s Avi Arad, an Israeli businessman who became involved with Marvel Entertainment in the ’90s as part of their deal with toymaker Toy Biz, and whose formation of Marvel Studios led to Marvel’s characters being so prominent in the late ’90s, at a time when the entire comic industry was floundering.
After bringing the characters back to television with cartoons based on Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and others, he had his first film successes with Blade in 1998 and X-Men in 2000, before tackling one of Marvel’s lynchpin characters with Spider-Man, which set a new opening record back in 2002, went onto gross over $400 million and led to two equally successful sequels.
It’s ten years on since Spider-Man and Arad and Sony Pictures have decided to relaunch The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield in the role of Peter Parker and Spider-Man and (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb at the helm, which is quite a daring move considering how many people loved the Raimi-Maguire-Dunst movies. Not only that, but they already greenlit and are developing a sequel with writers Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci with a release date already set before even knowing whether the fans will accept Garfield or the new direction. (So far, all three of ComingSoon.net’s reviewers have given it positive grades, which you can read here.)
When the project was greenlit, Matt Tolmach was the co-President of Production at Sony Pictures, but in late 2010, he decided to leave the company to start his own production company with The Amazing Spider-Man being his first main project, producing alongside Arad.
ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype got on the phone with the two producers last week and besides addressing some of the questions many people have had about the reboot, a couple of other highlights to look out for is Avi hinting they may be building the Spider-Man universe up to a movie featuring the Sinister Six.
We also tried to find out the reality of whether we’ll ever see a movie based on the popular Sony PlayStation 3 video game, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, because the project has now been in development for many years with two different directors. Arad tried to evade the question by bringing things back to Spider-Man, but Tolmach, who was the President at Sony when that project’s development began, jumped in and talked about he realities of the project and why it’s still a viable movie franchise.
You can read the full interview by clicking here!
