Spider-Man: No Way Home earned its place as easily the most successful of the MCU’s Multiverse Saga offerings so far with its 3x webslinger team-up, so you’d think a deeper dive into Spidey’s movie history would’ve been even more popular. Well, think again.
As we’ve become aware of before, exactly how Tom Holland’s Peter Parker would encounter Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s wall crawlers went through a few different iterations before the storyline we see play out was settled upon. It turns out that one version of the plot even saw Doctor Strange and Peter 1 pulled into Maguire and Garfield’s universes, allowing them to interact with familiar scenes from the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man films.
Concept artist Phil Saunders even revealed his artwork for these scenes, including one piece that inserts Benedict Cumberbatch and Holland’s Peter into Maguire’s battle with Bonesaw from 2002’s Spider-Man. Destined to leave fans drooling at the mouth, right? Actually, they kinda hate it.
Contrary to popular belief, Marvel fans don’t just care about crossovers above all else, as Redditors revealed they were “glad” these scenes were cut as they would’ve “served zero purpose for the story.”
“This would have just [felt] like meaningless fan service,” wrote another fan, not in need of servicing.
For others, this just would’ve awkwardly highlighted the superior visuals of the earlier films in comparison to No Way Home.
Honestly, visiting other familiar universes seems like something we’re bound to do in Avengers: Secret Wars, so hopefully folks respond to that more positively than they do these nixed No Way Home crossovers.