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Fanspeak Speaks: “All these critics, producers and artists are more than happy to celebrate how Spider-Man’s $1.8 billion worldwide box office single-handedly helped save the business after COVID-19 derailed the entire entertainment industry, but they can’t possibly bring themselves to recognize that it was a really good movie with an emotional story and compelling lead performance from Tom Holland that audiences connected with. This isn’t to knock the other movies that have been nominated for Best Picture throughout awards season, but you cannot convince me that No Way Home wasn’t one of the 10 best films of the year. Not only did it deliver a satisfying ending to the previous two Spider-Man movie franchises, it also gave the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Peter a reset before his possible finale in the current films. Comic book origins and big franchise connections aside, it was an extremely successful project that offered audiences a chance to once again bond over the movie-going experience. You’d think all this would be worth at least one compensatory Best Picture nod, even if it was just for the box office numbers? Unfortunately, there’s this stuck up, classist idea that comic book movies aren’t ‘real cinema. ‘Instead, they’re considered merely entertainment for the masses—not actual art. If famous directors don’t want to make comic book movies because they think they’re just big, dumb loud trash for stupid people, then fine. Don’t make them. But you can’t keep pretending these films don’t exist, and more importantly, that they don’t mean something to the people who see them. This obvious snub shines a spotlight on Hollywood’s hypocrisy when it comes to these projects. The industry is happy to cash the checks, but they will never be given the same status as films like BelfastThe Power of the Dog or Don’t Look Up, which actually wasn’t that good, but had all the right names attached to it.”

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