Kevin Feige stated not that long ago that the Academy Awards hold a certain bias towards the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the industry’s foremost purveyor of broad, crowd-pleasing blockbusters that almost always score solid reviews from critics and big box office returns.
Fans largely disagreed with that sentiment, but it sounds as though the architect of cinema’s most lucrative franchise is doing anything in his power to see Spider-Man: No Way Home shortlisted in at least a couple of major categories. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the company’s chief creative offers compared Tom Holland’s third solo outing to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
“In the way The Return of the King was sort of a celebration & culmination of all of that amazing work done on that trilogy, No Way Home is a celebration both of our Homecoming trilogy & the other incarnations of Spider-Man.”
You get what he’s aiming at; No Way Home is the epic conclusion to a massive trilogy that brought in billions, left fans enthralled and had critics suitably impressed. However, The Return of the King was the conclusion to a pair of so-called ‘unfilmable’ fantasy epics that reinvented big budget cinema, both of which landed plenty of major Oscars nods and more than a few wins.
It’s a little apples-to-oranges, but we’ll be very interested to see if Spider-Man: No Way Home causes an upset and snags a surprise Best Picture nod when the announcements are made.