No Way Home’s Early Pitches Didn’t Involve the Multiverse at All!
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home!
While the villainous characters from the older Spider-Man films arrived in the MCU from their own realities, No Way Home writers Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna revealed that the original script did not have the multiverse in it.
The early draft of No Way Home didn’t include the multiverse
Sommers and McKenna told Variety that when they began discussing Spider-Man: No Way Home with the production team, the whole idea of using the multiverse for the story of the film didn’t come up until later. “We had gone down a couple different roads with different story ideas that were not [the multiverse] that would then tease something like this at the end of it,” McKenna said. However, everyone involved with No Way Home‘s production soon had an idea: “Why tease the multiverse when you can just do it?”
Before this, Sommers and McKenna discussed how the help with No Way Home‘s plotline came in the form of the split between Disney and Sony in 2019 over Spider-Man appearing in the MCU. “We were taking meetings about it, and going, ‘Well, what would this movie be if it wasn’t in the MCU?” recalled McKenna.
“It was like any time you have a limitation thrown on you,” Sommers continued. “Then it creates possibilities and spurs all sorts of creative discussions. Fortunately, [Disney and Sony] came to their agreement before we were too far down any road, and we were able to jump right in with the old team.”
Kevin Feige on No Way Home:
More than this, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige and Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal also opened up about the presence of past film villains in No Way Home, with Feige saying, “We knew we were forcing ourselves to deal with [Spider-Man’s] identity being revealed. Now we see how his senior year is thrown into utter chaos.”
“The Multiverse was a good way for us to explore the problem of him becoming known to everyone,” Pascal said. “Peter opens Pandora’s box. And that’s what the Multiverse is.”
No Way Home will not be the final Marvel film to feature the multiverse, as the multiverse will be the prime focus of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, as the teaser trailer of the movie was seen in No Way Home‘s post-credits scene. Recently, a Japanese synopsis of the movie revealed that the film will follow Doctor Strange as he works with Wanda Maximoff/The Scarlet Witch and Wong to restore order to the entire multiverse. Some rumors also claim that Multiverse of Madness will be featuring brief appearances from Fantastic Four’s Mister Fantastic and Black Bolt of the Inhumans, as the two of them were members of the Illuminati alongside Doctor Strange in the Marvel comics.
No Way Home is now playing in theaters.
