The reveal of classic Spider-Men Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man: No Way Home was influenced by a reddit post seen by the film’s director Jon Watts.
Speaking at the Mediterrane Film Festival, Watts said the internet’s frenzied speculation over Maguire and Garfield appearing in the film had led one fan to mock up how they saw the pair of characters being re-introduced to audiences — and it was simply too close to Watt’s original vision for comfort.
In response, Watt said, filmmakers then crafted an entirely different introduction for the classic Spider-Men — in the house of sidekick Ned’s grandma — to deliberately upend fan expectations.
“There had been rumors that Tobey and Andrew were going to be in the movie, and this is while we’re shooting,” Watts said (thanks, Collider). “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. It’s probably a rooftop somewhere. It’s all sort of hazy. You’re still trying to figure it out.
“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.’ 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.'”
Describing his thought process as one where he trusted the audience to be wise enough to see where the story was going, but were still keen to be surprised about how it got there, Watts said he asked himself where no fan would expect the long-awaited return of Maguire and Garfield to take place.
“I was like, ‘Probably having the two Spider-Men appear at Ned’s Filipino grandma’s house in Queens,'” Watts said. “I don’t think anyone was doing fan art of that on reddit. It made perfect sense in the story because it’s kind of the first time we leave Peter’s narrative.
“We don’t know what’s happened to [Tom Holland’s Peter Parker]. We’re with Ned, we’re with MJ. They have to lay low. Where are they going to go? Ned’s grandma’s house. So, we built this whole scene around that.”
Watts went on to reveal that changing plans had been complicated by filming taking place amid Covid lockdowns, meaning the actor who ended up playing Ned’s grandma was “not an actor” at all.
“As soon as you add his grandma, who is not an actor… 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,” Watts recalled. “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.”
Tom Holland will return next year in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is due to begin filming imminently. Joining Holland will be Stranger Things star Sadie Sink in an undisclosed role, alongside MCU veteran Jon Bernthal reprising his role as Punisher. Maguire and Garfield are not expected to return — although who knows what multiversal shenanigans might require their attention in either Avengers: Doomsday, or more likely, Avengers: Secret Wars.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
