How Spider-Man: Homecoming Director Got Hired

Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts spills the beans on how he worked his way to Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures Entertainment to land his current directing job. The film, which rolls out all over the world in a couple of days, fully launches Tom Holland as the newest web-slinging superhero after his brief introduction in Captain America: Civil War last year.

Given that this is the third version of Spider-Man in the last 15 years, Marvel wanted to do something new to differentiate Holland's incarnation from his predecessors. And there are two things they hammered on into Homecoming's story to achieve that goal - first, that this Peter Parker exists in the MCU (hence the Civil War entry point) and second, that he is a typical high schooler - young and still naive. The former point is further reiterated with MCU veteran Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) mentoring the young hero in the upcoming flick. The latter, however, is attained in a way that this is going to be the first Spidey film with a high school backdrop infused with the usual coming-of-age story tropes.

In an extensive interview with Den of Geek! while doing the press activities for Homecoming, Watts has recalled how he first heard of the project and what drew him to it prompting his elaborate chase to hopefully land the gig:

"I had been wanting to make a coming of age movie, though, so when it was sort of floated that they were gonna make Spider-Man younger than we’ve ever really seen him before... that was really exciting. I had already been trying to make that sort of a movie, so I took all of those ideas I had been working on and kind of projected them onto this film."

With the perfect story pitch in his hands, the filmmaker executed his elaborate plan to land the job. Although he has admitted that at that point, despite his determination and eagerness, he still had few reservations about actually getting it:

"Then I just, kind of, bothered them. And everyone at Sony. I made like a mood reel, just editing together a bunch of clips into almost like a fake trailer. To show people the tone I was imagining. And I storyboarded a bunch of sequences that I sent to them, and just... I thought it was going to be really good practise for pitching to big studios. I really didn’t think I was gonna get it, until the very very end."

All the effort that Watts put into his cause seemingly is all worth it with early reviews for Homecoming predominantly positive - with a certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a great financial tracking in terms of box office numbers. Additionally, co-producers Amy Pascal and Kevin Feige had nothing but good praises for the filmmaker, who was also involved in writing the film's story alongside Chris McKenna, Christopher Ford, Erik Sommers, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein.

With Spider-Man: Homecoming inching its way to officially become another Marvel hit, it is safe to say that Watts did a tremendous job in bringing to life what some call the best version of Spider-Man on the big screen. So much so that he is likely coming back to helm it's 2019 sequel which will start principal photography sometime next year. The follow-up film is set to open Marvel's Phase 4 which is said to be significantly different than what we have right now especially with some MCU original cast members expected to bite the dust in Avengers: Infinity War and maybe also in its untitled sequel. It will be interesting how Watts will spin the character in Homecoming 2 given the character arc he has had by that time. Holland, himself, has some few ideas in mind about what's going down in the follow-up movie.