'Spider-Man: No Way Home' changed pivotal Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire scene after director looked at Reddit
The filmmaker behind Spider-Man: No Way Home recently discussed the challenges of uniting Tom Holland with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield — who played other iterations of Marvel's web-swinger in previous movies — in the multiversal blockbuster during a panel at the Mediterrane Film Festival.
Speaking to Collider's Steve Weintraub, Watts explained how the introduction of Maguire and Garfield's characters evolved over the course of production, noting that the older versions of Peter Parker were intended to arrive in a scene where Holland's version of the character is mourning the death of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei).
"There had been rumors that Tobey and Andrew were going to be in the movie, and this is while we're shooting," the director said. "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."
Watts had a vague idea of where the three Spider-Men would first join forces. "It's probably a rooftop somewhere," he said. "It's all sort of hazy. You're still trying to figure it out."
However, the filmmaker poked around online and discovered that fans had predicted that pivotal moment exactly as he'd first envisioned it. "Then 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 film ultimately introduced Garfield and Maguire in a different location, and without Holland's character present when they first arrive in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Rather than showing up simultaneously on a rooftop, the other Peters are accidentally summoned by Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), who uses the magical sling ring belonging to Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to bring the alternate Peters into Ned's family home.
Watts explained how the Reddit art prompted him to play with audience expectations. "I was like, 'What does no one expect that we're going to do? What's something that no one's going to see coming?'" he recalled. "I was like, 'Probably having the two Spider-Men appear at Ned's Filipino grandma's house in Queens. I don't think anyone was doing fan art of that on Reddit.'"Including Ned's grandmother, played by Mary Rivera, provided the zig-zag that Watts wanted for the scene. "It was the middle of the pandemic, so we had to find a lady and fly her from Hawaii to Atlanta to shoot all of this," he said. "So, as soon as you put her in that scene and change the location, now I feel like I've double-crossed the audience in the best way, where they're seeing everything that they were hoping that they would see in a way that they were never expecting they were going to."
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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