Welcome back from your slumber and food coma. As you start to raise from your holiday fog (hope you had a merry one), you’ll start to receive bits of information that penetrate your haze. Number one, you’ve probably heard by now that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” has crossed the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office, a significant threshold making the Sony/Marvel movie the first pandemic-era film to reach that mark (if that immediately makes you think that Sony will take all the wrong lessons from this, you should listen to our ‘No Way Home’ podcast discussion).
In anticipation of reaching this milestone, which they clearly knew would happen given the record-breaking box-office weekend, Sony is apparently going to start pushing “Spider-Man: No Way Home” for Oscar consideration. The sentiment behind their campaign seems to be a tacit, “‘No Way Home’ saved theaters, thus saved cinema, and for that, you should give the superhero movie some recognition.”
So given that ‘No Way Home’ has made mega-money, many of the execs at Marvel were given a platform at The Hollywood Reporter, to support their opinion that the movie they made, is worthy of Oscar love.
“I think both of these types of films deserve recognition,” Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige said, adding that he hopes Academy members will “think about the artistry that goes into storytelling that connects with a wide range of people on a very emotional level.”
Feige also emphasized how ‘No Way Home’ is bringing back joy to moviegoers who may not have been in a theater during the pandemic. “It’s a good thing when people are in a theater and they stand up and cheer. It’s a good thing when people are wiping tears because they’re thinking back on their last 20 years of moviegoing and what it has meant to them. That, to me, is a very good thing — the sort of thing the Academy was founded, back in the day, to recognize.”
Producer Amy Pascal, who was once the head of Sony Pictures, produced the ‘Amazing Spider-Man‘ movies with Andrew Garfield, and helped broker the deal between Marvel and Sony and their ongoing superhero collaboration said, “This movie was 20 years in the making. It’s really a love letter to all of the Spider-Man movies that came before it, and to all of the people who worked those films, and to the superhero movie genre.”
Feige suggested ‘No Way Home’ should get an overall achievement award in the same way Peter Jackson’s “Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King” did back in 2004.
“In the way ‘The Return of the King’ [the third and final installment, which swept the Oscars] was sort of a celebration and culmination of all of that amazing work that had been done on that trilogy,” Feige said. “This is a celebration both of our ‘Homecoming’ trilogy [the three most recent installments] and of the five other incarnations of ‘Spider-Man’ that had happened before.”
Sony’s chief Tom Rothman echoed the same sentiment. “Like the third ‘Lord of the Rings,’ this is the conclusion of an epic series and is quality commercial cinema. ‘Black Panther‘ was quality commercial cinema. It is essential that the Academy does not lose its connection with quality commercial cinema.”
Personally, I think they may be all wildly overestimating the quality of the super fan-service-y ‘No Way Home,’ and conflating box office success with that quality. Both ‘Return Of The King’ and ‘Black Panther’ are super solid films in a way that ‘No Way Home’ is not. And frankly, Marvel made the same argument with “Avengers: Endgame,” believing they should receive a ‘Lord Of The Rings’ like pat on the back for their achievement. If it didn’t happen for ‘Endgame,’ I don’t think there’s any way it happens for ‘No Way Home,’ but you may feel different. I’ll take that bet though.
