MOVIE NEWS – Tom Holland is heading into a massive summer: first with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, then two weeks later with his return as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The two projects almost collided, but Holland says Nolan’s working methods did more than solve a scheduling problem – they also helped reshape the new Spider-Man movie itself.

Tom Holland is about to have an incredibly busy summer. On July 17, he will appear in The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the two-thousand-plus-year-old epic poem. Holland plays Telemachus, the son of the Greek hero Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, who is on the long road home to Ithaca. Then, just two weeks later, Holland will return as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It has the potential to be a spectacular one-two punch, despite some unwarranted controversy swirling around The Odyssey.

But it almost did not happen. As Holland told GQ, when Nolan first called him to offer him a part in The Odyssey, he was already signed up to shoot Brand New Day during the same period. “So I said to Chris, like, ‘Look, I want to do this movie, but if I’m going to do it, I’m going to have to call Sony and have a very uncomfortable conversation.’” And have it he did. Holland called Sony Pictures chairperson Tom Rothman, who agreed to push back the filming dates for the next Spider-Man movie. “I think one of the reasons why Sony were happy to move is because Chris has that reputation of ‘This movie isn’t going to go five months over, and we aren’t actually going to lose Tom for two years,’” Holland speculated. “Any other director, it might have been a slightly different conversation.” If that was indeed part of Rothman’s thinking, it was spot-on. The Odyssey finished filming nine days ahead of schedule, and Holland had two weeks off before returning to the role of Spider-Man.

Tom Holland Insisted That Spider-Man: Brand New Day Take Cues From Christopher Nolan

It has been nearly five years since Tom Holland last appeared as Peter Parker in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. That is a long time to wait, but Holland thinks the delay was ultimately for the best, because it meant that Sony and Marvel got to hire Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton. “The Odyssey almost saved Spider-Man because we wouldn’t have had Destin,” Holland said. “He wouldn’t have been ready to make the movie when we were ready to go. We wouldn’t have had the six-month period to develop the script with Destin to get it to a place where it is now. And I truly believe that we’ve made the best version of any Spider-Man movie going. So while it was a tough pill to swallow for Sony, I think in hindsight, they’re very grateful that it happened.”

Seeing how Nolan worked on The Odyssey also changed how Holland approached his work on Brand New Day. “I think coming from the Marvel space, and I think this will upset Marvel a little bit – [Christopher Nolan’s] level of preparation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Holland said. “There’s not a single question you can ask him that he can’t answer immediately. He’s also quite simple in the way that he works. There are times when they use fancy camera tricks and things like that, but he really does come to set and he finds the shot.” Holland then carried that lesson into his own franchise. “I was really able to lay down the law and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out. We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’”

Now all that is left is to enjoy the movies themselves. Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31. As for whether Holland will appear in more Spider-Man movies after this, it sounds like a distinct possibility. “I think the truth is that playing Spider-Man has been the joy of my life,” he said. “I now kind of stand on the plinth of like, I’ll do it for as long as they’ll have me.”

Source: MovieWeb