Obviously, there shall be big fat spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home everywhere you look from here on out.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has always prided itself on delivering fan service on an unimaginable scale, and while Avengers: Endgame marked the pinnacle of in-canon crossovers so far, Spider-Man: No Way Home thrilled audiences in an altogether different fashion.
Sam Raimi veterans Tobey Maguire, Alfred Molina, Thomas Haden Church and Willem Dafoe were added into the multiversal melting pot alongside Marc Webb alumni Andrew Garfield, Rhys Ifans and Jamie Foxx, giving the Jon Watts crew of Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon and the rest a whole new set of shiny toys to play with.
As a result, No Way Home is packed to the brim with interactions and character beats that would have previously been thought impossible. In an interview with Discussing Film, writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers admitted they had to cut a lot of moments the fans would have loved, so as not to detract from the story.
“I mean, you want to give everyone their due, and just as a fan, you want to see those people as those characters and have fun with them. But at the end of the day, it’s a Spider-Man movie – you have to be telling the story of Peter Parker, and everything has to be in service of that.
So there were a lot of painful decisions made, you know, we would have loved to have done this and that and ‘Oh, wouldn’t be great if these two villains could do this!’ But it has to be in service of Peter’s journey, and you have to keep things moving. There were definitely a lot of what we call “little darlings” – little moments and things that you really just love – but sometimes you have to let them go.”
It would be easy to think that we may never see another movie like Spider-Man: No Way Home again, but next year brings both Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and DC’s The Flash, so we’re getting two of them. That being said, the web-slinging blockbuster has set a very high bar for the other pair to try and leap over.