As Marvel’s iconic wall-crawler continues to blow up the box office with Spider-Man: No Way Home, one of the reasons for the film’s huge success has been put down to the returning villains from past Spider-Man films as well as callbacks and homages to Spidey’s previous adventures. No Way Home screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers recently spoke about how they balanced the use of fan service with the film’s emotional story.
In an interview with DiscussingFilm, McKenna and Sommers spoke at length about a number of issues with the film’s production like the initial fallout between Sony and Disney where Tom Holland’s Spider-Man would no longer be in the MCU, other story ideas ,and whether or not Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe and Jamie Foxx would return as Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin and Electro among others.
On the subject of fan service and callbacks, which No Way Home has an abundance of, Sommers talked about how they tried to balance the fan service moments with the story of Peter Parker as he’s put through the wringer with his identity revealed to the world and a number of new enemies crossing over in the multiverse because of his attempt to make the world forget.
“It’s a balancing act because we love those previous movies, the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb ones, and we want to pay homage to them and make the fans happy,” Sommers said. “But you don’t want to just do lazy fan service for its own sake because it’ll ring false at some point. It’s a balancing act and at every point, again, you have to be thinking about the story. So if you really want to hear this villain say the line that he said in that other movie, you can’t let that drive you in terms of finding a moment for that. If you just go looking for that and you spend all this time, you’re going to end up writing some scene that maybe doesn’t even need to be in the movie.”
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“You just have to keep focused on telling Peter Parker’s story,” he continued, “and then hope that you find opportunities for those moments in there. We were working with a lot of smart and talented people, and just poring over these moments again and again, crafting things and trying to find those moments where we could include that kind of stuff in a way that felt like it was organic. We weren’t just doing it for its own sake.”
For the first time in the cinematic history of Spider-Man, our friendly neighborhood hero is unmasked and no longer able to separate his normal life from the high-stakes of being a Super Hero. When he asks for help from Doctor Strange the stakes become even more dangerous, forcing him to discover what it truly means to be Spider-Man.
Spider-Man: No Way Home sees Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home) directing Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Zendaya (MJ), Marisa Tomei (Aunt May), Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds), Tony Revolori (Flash Thompson), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Angourie Rice (Betty Brandt), Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (Jason Ionello), Benedict Wong (Wong), J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson), Martin Star (Mr. Harrington), J.B. Smoove (Mr. Dell), Hannibal Buress (Coach Wilson), Jamie Foxx (Electro), Alfred Molina (Doctor Octopus), Rhys Ifans (Lizard), Thomas Haden Church (Sandman), and Willem Dafoe (Green Goblin).
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
