Sony Reveals the Wild Reason Spider-Man: No Way Home Wasn’t Released in China
According to Sony, there's a very specific reason that Spider-Man: No Way Home didn't crack $2 billion at the global box office.
Spider-Man: No Way Home’s climactic battle wowed audiences (almost) everywhere at the multiplex when three different Sony-Marvel Spider-Men teamed up to battle some of their greatest foes. Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield both reprised their roles as Peters Parker alongside the latest incarnation of the eternally popular Marvel character, portrayed by Tom Holland, as the likes of the Green Goblin and Electro sought to bring the web-slinger to his knees in a Statue of Liberty-set showdown for the ages.
The film did phenomenally well at the global box office, so you’d imagine that Tom Rothman, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group, would be happy with its $1.9 billion haul – but not quite. During an appearance on Matt Belloni’s The Town podcast this week, Rothman seemed a little irked that the movie didn’t crack $2 billion instead, after being locked out of a theatrical release in China.
It turns out that China did engage with Sony about the possibility of releasing No Way Home there, but the edit they asked for was a bit of a stretch.
“They just [said] small thing,” Rothman revealed. “They said, ‘No problem. Just cut out the Statue of Liberty,’ which is where the climax takes place. That was the request.”
When Rothman was reminded that the Statue of Liberty is very much present in the last 20 minutes of No Way Home, he added, “Yeah, there was that. And also, I really didn’t look forward to standing up, sitting in there in front of Congress, telling them why I cut the Statue of Liberty out at the request of the Chinese Communist Party.”
A no doubt highly unrelated piece of information followed this revelation: the Statue of Liberty will not appear in this summer’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Maybe they’ll get that $2 billion this time.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Rothman also confirmed that Sony plans to reboot the SPUMC (stuff like Venom, Kraven the Hunter, and Madame Web) with new people. So, that’s something to look forward to…?