Having been in release for two weeks and become Sony’s highest-grossing movie already with over $1.16 billion in the coffers, it would be fair to say that we’re long past the point of trying to avoid Spider-Man: No Way Home spoilers.
It was an open secret that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were set to return as their respective Peter Parkers, and it must have been tough for the latter to hit the promotional trail for biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Netflix musical Tick, Tick… Boom! to continually lie through his teeth every time Spider-Man came up, which was a lot.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, No Way Home writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have been dishing the dirt on the fan favorite web-slingers in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Regarding Garfield, McKenna explained that The Amazing Spider-Man star wanted to take things in a darker direction to imply his friendly neighborhood superhero was still wracked by guilt and grief over the death of Gwen Stacy.
“The last time you saw Andrew Garfield, it was the death of Gwen, and that must have sent him down a dark spiral, maybe he never got out of. We don’t know, because there wasn’t a third movie that we saw. Where did he go? Maybe a really dark place. We wanted to be true to the characters in those movies. Really having conversations about specifying where they are, without giving away too much.
Not coming in, spilling all the beans. 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.”… 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.”
Ever since No Way Home was released, fans have been demanding The Amazing Spider-Man 3 happen, a far cry from where we were seven years ago. With the multiverse in play, it definitely can’t be ruled out, even if Garfield’s story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe threequel did give him a sense of closure.