The reveal of classic Spider-Men Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man: No Way Home was influenced by a reddit post seen by the film’s director Jon Watts.
Speaking on the Mediterrane Film Festival, Watts said the web’s frenzied speculation over Maguire and Garfield appearing within the film had led one fan to mock up how they saw the pair of characters being re-introduced to audiences — and it was just too near Watt’s original vision for comfort.
In response, Watt said, filmmakers then crafted a wholly different introduction for the classic Spider-Men — in the home of sidekick Ned’s grandma — to deliberately upend fan expectations.
“There had been rumors that Tobey and Andrew were going to be within the movie, and that is while we’re shooting,” Watts said (thanks, Collider). “We were writing the script, and we were working on where we wanted to disclose the fellows, and it all the time appeared like Peter’s going to be sad because Aunt May has just died, and that the portals are going to open, and the 2 Spider-Men are going to step out. It’s probably a rooftop somewhere. It’s all type of hazy. You are still attempting to figure it out.
“Then I used to be on reddit, and I used to be taking a look at individuals who had already made fan art of, ‘This might be what it is going to be like when the 2 Spider-Men get revealed.’ It was on a rooftop. It was sad, two Doctor Strange portals were open and two Spider-Men are stepping out. I used to be like, ‘Well, we won’t try this. If that is exactly what everyone thinks we’re going to do, we absolutely cannot try this.'”
Describing his thought process as one where he trusted the audience to be smart enough to see where the story was going, but were still keen to be surprised about the way it got there, Watts said he asked himself where no fan would expect the long-awaited return of Maguire and Garfield to happen.
“I used to be like, ‘Probably having the 2 Spider-Men appear at Ned’s Filipino grandma’s house in Queens,'” Watts said. “I do not think anyone was doing fan art of that on reddit. It made perfect sense within the story since it’s form of the primary time we leave Peter’s narrative.
“We do not know what’s happened to [Tom Holland’s Peter Parker]. We’re with Ned, we’re with MJ. They need to lay low. Where are they going to go? Ned’s grandma’s house. So, we built this whole scene around that.”
Watts went on to disclose that changing plans had been complicated by filming going down amid Covid lockdowns, meaning the actor who ended up playing Ned’s grandma was “not an actor” in any respect.
“As soon as you add his grandma, who is just not an actor… It was the center of the pandemic, so we had to search out a woman and fly her from Hawaii to Atlanta to shoot all of this,” Watts recalled. “So, as soon as you place her in that scene and alter the situation, now I feel like I’ve double-crossed the audience in the easiest way, where they’re seeing every thing that they were hoping that they’d see in a way that they were never expecting they were going to.”
Tom Holland will return next 12 months in Spider-Man: Brand Latest Day, which is as a result of begin filming imminently. Joining Holland can be Stranger Things star Sadie Sink in an undisclosed role, alongside MCU veteran Jon Bernthal reprising his role as Punisher. Maguire and Garfield will not be expected to return — although who knows what multiversal shenanigans might require their attention in either Avengers: Doomsday, or more likely, Avengers: Secret Wars.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You possibly can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social