Warning: This article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home!
Spider-Man: No Way Home originally included some “big” Marvel characters.
During an interview with The Wrap, No Way Home co-screenwriter Chris McKenna revealed that some major Marvel characters were removed from the script.
“I don’t know if we’re allowed to, honestly, but there were big characters,” he said. “But almost too big, because it always became a balancing act of how do we tell not only a story with all these awesome villains that we know we want to bring into this movie, the classic ones, but also how do we make this still a Tom Holland/Peter Parker story so that he’s not completely overshadowed?”
McKenna stopped short of revealing which characters would have been in the movie. But it sounds as though removing them was a good idea. After all, Spider-Man: No Way Home isn’t exactly short on heroes and villains.
Starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, No Way Home brought the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), Electro (Jamie Foxx), and Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) back to the big screen.
Alongside an appearance from Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) any additional Marvel characters may have made the movie feel a lot more cluttered. It may even have shifted the focus away from Peter Parker.
“Because at the end of the day, it’s not going to be a great Spider-Man movie if you’re not telling an emotional Peter Parker story,” added McKenna. “We had these riches that we had to… This giant idea [with] all these great actors, but also we had to tell a story that felt like we were telling a personal story for our main character.”
The multiverse crossover in Spider-Man: No Way home featured some of Spider-Man’s greatest villains, as well as a long-rumoured return for both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as their own incarnations of the web-slinging superhero.
And while it was originally intended to be little more than a post-credit scene this complicated crossover proved to be a big hit with the fans, as No Way Home became Sony’s highest-grossing film of all time.
Spider-Man: No Way Home debuted in theaters on December 17, 2021.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
