The real reason why Andrew Garfield was fired as Spider-Man, replaced by Tom Holland

The lukewarm box office reception of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 certainly stalled Sony’s plans on expanding the series, but one particular incident involving star Andrew Garfield also contributed to the termination of the franchise.

After the infamous Sony hack of 2014, it was revealed in an email that the actor was ‘let go’ from the role after he failed to show up at an event where Sony chief Kaz Hirai was supposed to announce The Amazing Spider-Man 3 for a 2017 release. Garfield said that he no-show was because of an illness.

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According to a report, the email read, “Here we are about one hour away from our Gala event and Andrew decides he doesn’t want to attend. He has a rather scruffy beard and he just wants to be left alone.”

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Asked about if he was fired from the role, he told the Guardian in 2016, “No, I don’t think so. What I’ll proudly say is that I didn’t compromise who I was, I was only ever myself. And that might have been difficult for some people.”

Garfield had always been candid about his second Spider-Man film’s poor reception, and not shy about assigning blame. He told the Daily Beast in 2014, “I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it – because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related. Once you start removing things and saying, ‘No, that doesn’t work,’ then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story.”

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More recently, in one of Variety’s Actors on Actors sessions, he told Amy Adams, “I signed up to serve the story and serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”

Garfield’s run as Spider-Man ended with the second film, with Sony choosing to arrive at an arrangement with Marvel Studios to allow the character to appear in the MCU films. Actor Tom Holland stepped in, and has since played Spider-Man in two solo films, Captain America: Civil War, and two Avengers movies. Sony has since started its own shared universe of Marvel characters, and Garfield has appeared in acclaimed films such as Hacksaw Ridge and Silence.

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