Tom Holland, Power Couple
Tom Holland may have reached a career high, coming straight from playing Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to returning as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The Spider-Man film earned US$932 million worldwide in its opening weekend, the second-biggest global debut ever, while its US$360 million North American opening beat the record previously held by Avengers: Endgame. It has been breaking records everywhere and is expected to finish among the highest-grossing films of all time. Holland did not even need James Cameron or the entire Marvel ensemble to do it. Well, I suppose he had Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus — I mean, Punisher — respectively the weakest and strongest dynamics in the film.
“I did not expect “Endgame’s” [domestic] record to be beat, but I couldn’t be happier that it was beat this past weekend by our 38th MCU movie,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Variety.
“It’s overwhelming, frankly, to find ourselves in this position on a Monday morning — in the very best way.”
“When a shared universe works,” he said, “these are the results.”
Personally, I think Spider-Man is built differently and does not need the rest of the MCU to bring in audiences. Tying Tony Stark into Spider-Man’s early films helped bring Peter into the MCU, but Iron Man’s presence also overshadowed Spidey, turning him into the boy sidekick he was never designed to be. We then had to sit through Peter learning not to use Tony’s technology as a crutch.
Overlapping the two films was a nightmare, though. Speaking to People, Holland recalled agonising over the choice with his wife, Zendaya. “To be honest, when I got home after our meeting, I sat down with Z and was like, ‘I’ve been offered this movie.’ And she was like, ‘By who?’ And I was like, ‘It’s the big one.’ And she was like, ‘Chris?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s Chris Nolan.’”
“And then we had Spider-Man that was literally scheduled to go the same day that we would start shooting,” he continued. “Z said, ‘I’ll leave you if you don’t do The Odyssey.’”
Fortunately, he got to do both.
