The Marvel Cinematic Universe has settled into a comfortable if all-too-familiar formula when it comes to putting together the third acts of its comic book blockbusters; there’s going to be an onslaught of CGI as a hero or heroes do battle against the villain, who quite often comes with the support of a faceless army of cannon fodder.
On the plus side, the dreaded blue sky beam hasn’t been seen for a while, but arguably the weakest parts of both Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings were their respective climactic showdowns, which leaned heavily into excessive spectacle for no other reason than the fact that’s what Marvel does.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is widely expected to conclude with three web-slingers doing battle against at least five villains, so the orgy of pixels is inevitable. However, Tom Holland revealed during his GQ interview that he urged director Jon Watts to change the original ending because it wasn’t working for him.
Anyway, the day finally came to shoot the big finale, “the crescendo scene, like, is this really f***ing happening? It’s crazy.” Only, it wasn’t working. “I kept stopping and being like, ‘I’m so sorry, I just don’t believe what I’m saying.’ ” The director, Jon Watts, took him aside, and Holland told him: It wasn’t me. The scene was wrong. “We sat down, we went through it, and we came up with a new idea,” Holland says. “Then we pitched it to the writers, they rewrote it, and it works great.”
Holland is now in a position to speak up and let Marvel know if he isn’t happy with how his character is being portrayed, so it’s encouraging to hear that he chimed in during the finale of what’s shaping up to be one of the biggest comic book adaptations ever, urging the writers and director to refit Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s ending at the last minute.