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Spider-Man: No Way Home – Creating Those Small Details [SPOILERS]

We will be talking about major spoilers for the third act of Spider-Man: No Way Home. The movie has only been out two weeks, so we're going to keep trying to hide the spoilers the best we can. If you haven't seen the movie yet, consider this your spoiler warning not to go beyond the next image.

It was one of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood, but it was still pretty cool that both Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire both came back to reprise their roles as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was nice to see them, and they did a very good job of not taking too much attention away from Tom Holland since this was his movie. We did get a few details about what these two had been up in their own universes, but not too much. It turns out, according to screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, that both Maguire and Garfield were both involved with the small number of details that we were given in the movie. McKenna explained what kind of details both of the actors wanted to reveal.

Tobey wanted to be very minimal about how much you know. Very, very minimal. Andrew really loved the idea of he's still tortured over what happened in Amazing Spider-Man 2 and where that left him, and how they could bring that to Tom. "We can empathize with you. We do know what you are going through. If anyone in the world knows what you're going through, it's us." But also, "We can be beacons." Tobey especially has come through that darkness. We thought it was cool that Andrew's Peter was still in the midst of that darkness. They weren't just here to go, "Two awesome Jedi knight heroes who show up and are going to help you take down the bad guys." They are going through their own things. We were trying to write up to the characters that they did such a great job of creating and really being true to those characters and those stories and those worlds so that it didn't feel like we were doing curtain call, fan-service.

McKenna went on to talk about the dynamic between the three actors, and while they are all playing Peter Parker, they aren't the same person. They are all shaped by their own unique experiences, and, in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Garfield calls them "brothers," which was a meaningful relationship to establish between these three people.

I think the last third of the movie is my favorite part of the whole movie. You get to that point and you're like, "We could have really dropped the ball and it would have been our fault." Because these guys were game. They showed up and we reworked all those scenes when they came on [with] the actors, the producers and the director. We reworked the rooftop school scene and all that stuff and there was so much fun improv of those guys. Andrew really leaned into the lonely, middle brother. That's one of the things we started saying. "He is the middle brother!" You have the elder brother, Tobey, who is the wise one. The middle sibling thing, he feels like he's not getting the attention of the other two. It works so great for that character. Andrew leaned into middle brother syndrome. "The baby one is getting all the attention! What about me?" (Laughs.) He's obviously hurting. I think he has so many great flourishes. So does Tobey. I think that dynamic of brothers, that's why it's so great when Andrew says, "God, I always wanted to have brothers." While simplistic, it is a great paradigm for the three of them coming together and you want it to feel like, "Oh, it's not just doppelgangers." They are different. They are not the same person. They are born of the same experience and the same spider-bite. They are like brothers. No one knows the heaven and hell if what it is to be in an experience quite like your sibling. No one knows what this family is like. At least they got a sense of, "You're not alone. There's a community. You guys have each suffered in your own way." And then to get help heal each other, it was wonderful to be a part of getting there.

McKenna and the rest of the creative were right to lean into these scenes because they really are some of the best in the entire movie. Spider-Man: No Way Home is kind of a mess for most of the first half until Aunt May dies, but it really comes together once the three Peter's come together. There is such a visceral reaction from crowds all three times I've personally seen these movies, from younger people really reacting to Garfield to my parents really reacting to Maguire. The moments between the three Peter's and the different Peter's interactions with their various villains really save what could have been a giant mess of a movie.

Summary: For the first time in the cinematic history of Spider-Man, our friendly neighborhood hero is unmasked and no longer able to separate his normal life from the high-stakes of being a Super Hero. When he asks for help from Doctor Strange, the stakes become even more dangerous, forcing him to discover what it truly means to be Spider-Man.

Spider-Man: No Way Home, directed by Jon Watts, stars Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau with Marisa Tomei. It was released on December 17, 2021.

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