As Spider-Man fans look ahead to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, arriving in theaters next summer, there’s still a lot of love for 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, especially for its incorporation of previous Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield into Tom Holland’s Marvel world. As you might expect, the multiple Spidey reveal was a scene director Jon Watts and his team spent a lot of time plotting out—even consulting an unexpected source to help shape things: Reddit.
According to Collider, Watts talked more about that on a panel at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival. Though keeping Maguire and Garfield’s involvement a secret was crucial—made somewhat less difficult by the fact that they were filming during the pandemic, and the set environment was even more closed than usual—fans still had an inkling about what was in the works.
“There had been rumors that Tobey and Andrew were going to be in the movie, and this is while we’re shooting,” Watts explained. “It’s another example of how you can have a script that’s working, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. You can keep making it better. We were writing the script, and we were working on where we wanted to reveal the guys, and it always seemed like Peter’s going to be sad because Aunt May has just died, and that the portals are going to open, and the two Spider-Men are going to step out.”
He continued. “It’s probably a rooftop somewhere. It’s all sort of hazy. You’re still trying to figure it out.”
Then came the pivotal discovery—one that helped No Way Home decide which direction not to go. “I was on Reddit, and I was looking at people who had already made fan art of, ‘This is probably what it’s going to be like when the two Spider-Men get revealed,'” Watts recalled. “It was on a rooftop. It was sad, two Doctor Strange portals were open and two Spider-Men are stepping out. I was like, ‘Well, we can’t do that. If that’s exactly what everyone thinks we’re going to do, we absolutely can’t do that.'”
The portals, of course, were still a necessary part of how “Peter-Two” and “Peter-Three” get in on the action, but the rooftop setting quickly bit the dust. We hope those Reddit fan artists see Watts’ quotes and realize their great power in helping shape the movie.
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