During the buildup to Spider-Man: No Way Home, when Sony and Marvel Studios were on a mission to maintain the veil of secrecy for as long as possible, almost everything we saw from the movie revolved around the bridge battle between Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus.
Fans even began openly mocking the action sequence, questioning if the entirety of the multiversal adventure took place in a single location because they were getting very tired of seeing it so often. It was an important scene to help set the stage and get the ball rolling for what followed, but a lot of audiences felt as though they’d seen the entire thing already by the time they sat down in the theater to watch No Way Home.
However, visual effects supervisor Kelly Port revealed in an interview with Befores and Afters that it almost ran a great deal longer, with the scrap initially scheduled to last fifteen whole minutes.
“Digital Domain was tasked with doing that sequence, which was a few hundred VFX shots…There’s so many cool iterations of that sequence that will never see the light of day. It was way longer. At one point in its longest iteration, it was fifteen minutes long.”
That’s roughly 10% of Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s running time, and now that Port’s admission is out in the open, don’t be surprised if Twitter users plant their tongues firmly in cheek and mount a #ReleaseTheBridgeSceneCut campaign to try and see the showdown in its entirety.