The Untold Story of Peter Parker Begins with "The Amazing Spider-Man"

Spider-Man returns to the big screen for the untold story of Peter Parker in Columbia Pictures' new action-adventure “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Focusing on an untold story that tells a different side of the Peter Parker story, the new film stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Irrfan Khan, with Martin Sheen and Sally Field. The film is directed by Marc Webb. Screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves.

“The Amazing Spider-Man” is the story of Peter Parker (Garfield), an outcast high schooler who was abandoned by his parents as a boy, leaving him to be raised by his Uncle Ben (Sheen) and Aunt May (Field). Like most teenagers, Peter is trying to figure out who he is and how he got to be the person he is today. Peter is also finding his way with his first high school crush, Gwen Stacy (Stone), and together, they struggle with love, commitment, and secrets.

As Peter discovers a mysterious briefcase that belonged to his father, he begins a quest to understand his parents’ disappearance – leading him directly to OsCorp and the lab of Dr. Curt Connors (Ifans), his father’s former partner. As Spider-Man is set on a collision course with Connors’ alter-ego, The Lizard, Peter will make life-altering choices to use his powers and shape his destiny to become a hero.

In beginning a new chapter in the Spider-Man saga, it was important to the filmmakers to show a side of Peter Parker that moviegoers haven’t seen before.

Avi Arad, formerly the head of Marvel Studios and now a producer who has shepherded the Spider-Man films from the very beginning, notes, “Spider-Man has filled thousands of pages of comic books with hundreds of stories since he debuted fifty years ago. That’s a deep vein of resources to mine as we look to continue the story of Peter Parker on the screen.”

“Since we were reestablishing Peter Parker, we had to build the audience’s relationship with him from the ground up,” notes director Marc Webb. “In order to do that legitimately, we begin the story with Peter Parker as a seven-year-old boy. We see him before his parents left, before they handed him off to Aunt May and Uncle Ben. This allowed the audience to experience the significant emotional cues in his life.

“This Peter Parker is a little different: he’s still an outsider, but he’s an outsider by choice,” continues Webb. “He has a chip on his shoulder – he’s the kid who rejects people before they can reject him. The humor, the sarcasm, the rebellious streak emanates from that little kid who got left behind so long ago.”

“For this film, we talked a lot about Peter Parker, a boy who lost his parents at a very young age – and lost them in a way that’s still a mystery to him,” adds Tolmach. ”It leaves him with a lot of formative questions – Where am I from? Who am I? Why did my parents leave? Why did this happen? Who am I going to become? These are all the primal questions that face our hero. This angle had not been heavily explored, yet it’s so critical to who Peter Parker is – this is the essence of a young man’s journey. So we were incredibly excited to go down this road with the story and these characters.”

“The things that are unresolved, the things we have to live with, send us down a road – and that road can make us better people or not,” says Webb.

“A key part of our orchestration of the story is that everything in Peter’s journey happens because of his yearning to find out about his father,” says Webb, concurring. “The sequence of events which leads him to OsCorp and to Dr. Connors results in his being bitten. I didn’t want the spider bite to be an arbitrary occurrence, but a representation and result of his desire to fill a void.”

Opening across the Philippines on Friday, June 29 in IMAX 3D, Digital 3D, 2D and regular theaters, “The Amazing Spider-Man” is distributed by Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.com.ph for trailers, exclusive content and free downloads. Like us at www.Facebook.com/ColumbiaPicturesPH and join our fan contests.