This prolific director says he wishes he directed Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man.

Film Twitter has recently been left rocking when Film Updates posted: “Luca Guadagnino says he wishes he directed Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man.” Guadagnino’s films are so rich in striking visuals and interpersonal complexity that it might seem odd to think he’d focus all of that kind of attention on a superhero movie, but it makes us think about what kind of movie The Amazing Spider-Man could have been.

Those of us who were there in theaters to see The Amazing Spider-Man when it was released in 2012 know what a major tonal shift it was from the other superhero movies of the time. This was the year of the first Avengers movie—a cultural landscape already being slowly saturated with heroes and expectations for those films in place. And The Amazing Spider-Man was a reboot! The first three Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies had already become a cultural phenomenon on their own. So walking in to see Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone acting in a Spider-Man-shaped teen romance certainly raised some eyebrows.

Not mine, though. I loved it. I was a teen who’d been happily lapping up the Twilight films and the newly released novel The Fault in Our Stars. Teen romances were my jam, and one that featured a svelte Andrew Garfield playing one of my favorite superheroes in skin-tight spandex? I was the target demographic.

And that target was very much hit. I fell for adorkable Peter Parker with his skateboard and swoopy hair hook, like, and sinker. He was still Peter Parker—too smart, too snarky, not willing enough to bend the knee to the popular kids—but he also just happened to be the exact type for every Tumblr girly of the moment. His charisma and his chemistry with Emma Stone were insane; it was impossible not to love him.

After the second The Amazing Spider-Man, there are many things we pointed to as to why things fell apart and why we never got a third movie. Did they try to pack too much into the sequel? Was Andrew Garfield getting too old? Were they already figuring out how to incorporate Spider-Man into the established Marvel Cinematic Universe and didn’t want to deal with Andrew’s Spider-Man’s established backstory? Personally, I’m of the opinion that Marvel decided to give him the ax when Andrew started talking about casting M.J. as a black man, pitching to producer Matt Tolmach: ”‘What if MJ is a dude?’ Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking!…So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?” (Entertainment Weekly, 2013). 

This comment especially is what makes Luca Guadagnino’s desire to have directed Andrew Garfield in these films so intriguing. This is a director best known for films like Challengers and Call Me By Your Name. He goes for eroticism and pushing characters to new emotional depths. He would have been the perfect director to explore Spider-Man’s potential bisexuality.

And it’s not like Garfield was shy about approaching directors with the premise. Director Marc Webb even knew the specific actor Andrew had in mind: Michael B. Jordan. Andrew Garfield told Entertainment Weekly, “I’ve been obsessed with Michael B. Jordan since The Wire. He’s so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better—we’d have interracial bisexuality!”. And while a plot like a sexually fluid Spidey might seem dense for a run-of-the mill hero flick, this kind of complicated romantic development is exactly the kind of thing Luca Guadagnino loves to tackle. It’s no wonder he’s thinking about the kind of Amazing Spider-Man movie he might have made.

Andrew Garfield told The Independent in 2019 that he felt pressured to retract his statements about his desire for a queer Spider-Man so Sony could sell tickets to homophobes. All I know is that if The Amazing Spider-Man 3 had come out in 2016—with everything that happened that year—made by a cast and production team that really cared about telling queer stories, and that film featured Peter Parker in an interracial queer relationship, it would have meant a lot to this little queer fan. And to all the other queer, marginalized kids who see themselves in Spidey. After all, he could swing both ways.