Yahoo Autos ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Screenwriters Explain All Those Surprises and Spoilers: ‘This Wasn’t Just Fan Service’
SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses many major plot developments in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” currently playing in theaters. Please do not read if you have not seen the film.
Of the many multiversal pleasures of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” one of the most satisfying has been how every single person involved — from director Jon Watts to producers Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal to stars Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Benedict Cumberbatch and Marisa Tomei — managed to keep the movie’s biggest secret: Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were both reprising their roles as Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man.
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What makes that feat so much more impressive is that everyone expected it to happen. Ever since news leaked that actors like Jamie Foxx and Alfred Molina were reprising their roles as various Spider-Man villains — news Molina happily confirmed to Variety back in April — fans across the globe have flooded the internet with a torrent of fan-made posters, trailers and movie stills depicting the team-up of Maguire, Garfield and Holland’s three web-slingers. And yet no one (not even Molina!) confirmed that the two earlier Parkers were indeed returning. That unified front to keep audiences guessing undoubtedly helped “No Way Home” become a must-see theatrical event, to the tune of $1.1 billion and counting in global box office gross.
For screenwriters Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, watching so many fans enthusiastically pump out all manner of speculation about their movie was one of many unusually intense experiences while making it.
“We were so excited about these different surprises,” Sommers told Variety. “And then, suddenly, it seems like people had decided [Andrew and Tobey were returning], so maybe some of these surprises wouldn’t be so surprising. That was concerning, but at the same time, the sheer level of speculation and interest was really exciting. That was such great fuel to keep going and give [fans] something that would delight them.”
Finally free of (most) spoiler restrictions, Sommers and McKenna — who also wrote 2019’s “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and co-wrote 2017’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” with Watts, Christopher Ford, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley — talked with Variety about the long, complicated road to bring Maguire and Garfield’s Peter Parkers into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They also discussed the tragic fate of Aunt May (Tomei), the tricky logic of identity-erasing magic spells, how the heck Eddie Brock and Venom (Tom Hardy) squeezed into the MCU and their pitch for the future of all the Peter Parkers.
Start With “the Kitchen Sink”
When McKenna and Sommers first started talking with Watts, Feige, Pascal and the rest of the filmmaking team about Holland’s third Spidey feature, the multiverse wasn’t the first or even the second possible storyline.
“We had gone down a couple different roads with different story ideas that were not [the multiverse] that would then tease something like this at the end of it,” says McKenna. Finally, everyone thought, “Why tease the multiverse when you can just do it?”
They first started writing “No Way Home” in December 2019 — and they didn’t really stop until early 2021, when production wrapped. Pulling together a gigantic story that serviced a multitude of characters from three different “Spider-Man” movie franchises during the COVID-19 pandemic led to, as McKenna puts it, some “dark days” where it seemed like the movie would never come together.
One example: in March 2020, when the duo were still working on their first draft of the script.
“It was like, ‘Wait, you guys are asking about the script?'” jokes McKenna. “‘I’m buying weapons and generators and ramen and toilet paper!'”
Drawing from the end of “Far From Home,” in which Holland’s Peter Parker is outed as Spider-Man to the world, Sommers and McKenna knew their inciting incident would be Peter’s request to Doctor Strange (Cumberbatch) to cast a spell that would put his Spidey identity back in the closet, so to speak, which would crack open the multiverse. But they had to start writing without knowing for certain whether the actors who had played the previous Spidey characters would, in fact, appear in the movie.
So at first, every major previous “Spider-Man” character was in play.
The duo’s initial mandate: “Let’s write the script that is the kitchen sink and we’ll just act like we were going to get everything we wish for,” says McKenna. “And like Peter’s wish, it became a nightmare, and it required very, very talented people to help us not die at the end.”
In the final movie, many legacy characters — including Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson, Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy and Sally Field’s Aunt May — don’t appear. But the duo are reticent to discuss how those characters might have worked into the first draft of the movie.
“We went down different roads with different characters that just didn’t fit,” says McKenna. “We can’t get into the details of that because it might be the kind of thing where they’ll find a way to explore those ideas. So I’d hate to spoil anything, because I think we had a lot of fun.”
Suffice it to say, however, their early scripts had a lot of characters — too many to do justice. “The first draft, we bit off more than we could chew,” says Sommers. “Maybe some would argue that we still bit off more than we can chew.”
Speaking of biting, the screenwriters say that including Eddie Brock and his alien symbiote Venom in the film’s final battle was “definitely discussed.” The pair confirmed that Watts directed the post-credits tag on “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” which showed Brock zapped into the MCU. But Brock was ultimately relegated to the “No Way Home” post-credits scene instead. As for how a character who had never met any Peter Parker, let alone Spider-Man, could be pulled into the MCU by a spell specifically drawing people who had to know Peter Parker was Spider-Man? “The idea is that the symbiote has knowledge of other universes. Buried in his brain is some knowledge of that connection,” McKenna said.
The screenwriters knew the central pull of a multiverse story was nostalgia for the past “Spider-Man” movies, but they were steadfast in preventing that from becoming what drove their story.
“The most important thing is this wasn’t just going to be a bunch of fan service. It wasn’t going to be just curtain calls for everybody,” McKenna says. “We had to figure out a way that this [movie] told the story of this Peter Parker right now, organically coming off of where we left the last movie. That was always our north star. Yeah, it’s a big fun idea. Let’s not forget Peter. You can’t get lost in the mix. It has to be his emotional journey.”
Peter Parker and Peter Parker Meet Peter Parker…
As McKenna and Sommers wrote, they came up with a handy nomenclature to differentiate between the three Peter Parkers: In honor of Sam Raimi, who directed all three Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” movies, Maguire’s Peter was called “Raimi-verse Peter” or “Raimi-verse Spider-Man” (depending on whether he had the mask on or not). Similarly, Garfield’s Peter was called “Webb-verse Peter” or “Webb-verse Spider-Man” for “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” director Marc Webb. For simplicity’s sake, Holland’s Peter was just called Peter. (When discussing the Peters with Variety, however, McKenna and Sommers also used the actors’ names.)
This was presuming both Maguire and Garfield were on board. Thankfully, the screenwriting duo got periodic — and optimistic — updates from the producers on securing the actors.
“Pretty much all we were hearing is, ‘Yeah, we reached out. He’s interested. He thinks that sounds neat,'” Sommers says. “We’re like, ‘Really?! Oh, great!’ But nothing was guaranteed.”
At first, they had planned a very different introduction for Maguire and Garfield’s Peters: They arrive just after the death of Peter’s Aunt May (more on that in a bit), and not by happenstance.
“They are brought by a Marvel character going, ‘Here are the saving graces and they’re going to help you through this,'” McKenna says (though he declines to say which character it was). “It was just more of a deus ex machina.”
And that’s how it stayed even as the film started production in the fall of 2020. By last Christmas, however, it was clear that they needed a much better way to bring in the other Peters.
“We were changing the story so much,” McKenna says. “We were already two months into production. And we were having to now take another whack at act three, which we hadn’t had time to because we were shooting act one and act two.”
Worn down by the punishing schedule, constant uncertainty and brand new COVID-19 protocols, the duo were terrified of screwing up the crucial moment in the whole movie. So they holed up together over Christmas and came up with what is now in the film: Ned (Batalon), messing around with Strange’s teleporting sling ring with MJ (Zendaya), accidentally conjures a portal to Garfield’s Peter Parker while wondering where Holland’s could be, causing all three to panic (delightfully) at the total weirdness of the situation.
“It was a beam of light in darkness,” says McKenna. “It was such a gift, particularly at that point in the writing process, to be writing for those two characters. It the darkest part of the year, the darkest part of production, the darkest part of the story development, and it was like, Oh! Now we get Tobey and Andrew.”
