It was clear from the start that Marvel Studios wanted to make the Marvel Cinematic Universe's take on Spider-Man as different as possible from what had come before. Peter Parker was kitted out in Stark Industries tech, while he faced villains who had never appeared on the big screen until that point.
In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Holland's web-slinger squares off with five familiar faces from the past, including icons like the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina). However, Kevin Feige has now confirmed that there were no plans to reboot either character for the MCU prior to the decision being made to bring the original versions back for this threequel.
"It did not occur to us to do a new Goblin story, or to do an Oscorp story, or to do Doc Ock, or anyone that had been done before, which is why Vulture and Mysterio were really the key characters," the Marvel Studios President explains in the video below. "Even as we were doing that - and I had been saying for years, even before anybody asked me what I thought - that you can't get better than Alfred Molina as Doc Ock."
"[I said] stepping into those shoes would be very, very difficult. And wouldn't it be fun to find a way, if you were ever going to bring Doc Ock back, it would have to be Alfred Molina," Feige continued. "And in early development on this third Homecoming movie, we realized that thanks to the MCU, there was a way to do that."
This would explain why Peter has never heard of Otto Octavius in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and why it's confirmed that Oscorp and Norman Osborn don't exist in this world. With that in mind, we might as well forget about seeing the MCU's take on these villains in the next trilogy - though that's not necessarily the end of the world when there are still lots of other bad guys who can appear.
Check out the full interview with Feige about Spider-Man: No Way Home below:
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