Marvel and Sony smashed Spider-Man: No Way Home out of the park. Before release, the movie made several huge promises and over-delivered on all of them, even somehow managing to keep Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s roles a secret until opening night.
A year and a half later, it’s still arguably the best post-Endgame MCU, release and fans are poring over behind-the-scenes details and pieces of concept art for what could have been.
We’ve seen that at one point Mysterio was set to make some kind of comeback, that Green Goblin was once going to steal parts of the Iron Man armor for his own suit, and now over on r/MarvelStudios, we have a very amusing and weird encounter between Doc Ock and Peter Parker.
We get what the artist was going for here. Once he’s been switched from evil to good, Alfred Molina’s Otto Octavius is an avuncular and friendly chap, and probably would casually rest a clawed tentacle on someone’s arm while explaining something.
On the other hand, this rendition makes Holland look like, as one reply put it: “a mix between Jeff Goldblum and Billy Crystal”. Another compares him to a Japanese schoolgirl, or that this could be a MAD Magazine cover. But though the faces and set-up are amusingly wonky, we do like Doc Ock using his tentacles to casually create a seat for them both.
It’s perhaps notable we haven’t seen the MCU Doc Ock yet, but after No Way Home it’s debatable how that story would even work. After all, if Peter realizes a good-natured scientist named Otto Octavius is about to conduct an experiment involving metal tentacles it’s in his best interests to swing over and put a stop to it as soon as possible.