It's easy to forget that Spider-Man: No Way Home was shot in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this seems to have limited how much certain actors could contribute to the blockbuster. We've already pointed out that the shots of Rhys Ifans as Dr. Curt Connors and Thomas Haden Church as Flint Marko were lifted from The Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3, and there may be a good reason why.
During a recent interview with before & afters, the threequel's VFX Supervisor Kelly Port was asked if the team working on Spider-Man: No Way Home had access to facial capture for Sandman. "Well, we had his voice," she confirmed. "We weren’t able to get a lot of visuals on him, but we were able to get his voice for sure and we got scans and textures and things like that."
In other words, Haden Church was never actually on set, which obviously explains why Marvel Studios played around with that Spider-Man 3 footage and repurposed it for this movie.
Elsewhere in the interview, Port addressed the balance of finding ways to make Sandman look like fans remember while doing something new with the villain. "There were two parts to him, where he’s more humanoid and talking, and when he is in the sanctum. Digital Domain did a lot of that work. And then Luma did the sequence that we called the power line corridor, which is where Sandman is first introduced."
"Then Imageworks, for the end battle, they did the much bigger Sandman with big FX sims. I remember when we were first interviewing companies, there’s a little bit of collective post-traumatic stress disorder with anyone who had previously worked on Sandman. And so I knew that going in, I had a feeling this was going to be challenging both technically and creatively, just to get that character looking right and behaving right. I think it looked pretty cool."
The VFX used on Sandman way back in 2007 were pretty groundbreaking, and bringing him back to life without Haden Church being present is an amazing feat. It's surprising to learn motion-capture wasn't used for his scenes when he's humanoid in appearance, and even more shocking that the actor's likeness was recreated after the fact with only his voice as a guide for the VFX teams.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is now playing in theaters.