Many of you will be unaware of this, but shortly before interviews for Spider-Man: No Way Home took place, the press was shown only 37 minutes of the movie. The reason given was that visual effects were unfinished, and it turns out work continued even after the film arrived in theaters.
Talking to ComicBook.com, Digital Domain's Scott Edelstein revealed that they boarded the project last February...and were still working on Spider-Man: No Way Home up until mid-January 2022!
"I think that we delivered final shots into the second week of December or something like that. It was really, really close," he confirmed, fresh off a recent Oscar nomination. "If they're not going to do stereo on a show or have a 3D release or something like that, then really you can go right up until it comes out theaters nowadays with digital releases and everything, right?"
"We're picking that stuff up and running with it all the way up to the end, really. And sometimes, even after say the feature film delivers for the North American audience, they'll want to add shots or do additional shots for like the video release or behind the scenes and this and that. I think we were still doing shots like into mid-January or something, on the show that's delivered in December."
This might explain footage that went viral last month showing different versions of that scene with Norman Osborn destroying his Green Goblin mask. Changes had clearly been made to that entire sequence, and we're guessing it had something to do with polishing up the de-ageing effects used on Willem Dafoe. However, any other VFX alterations are likely to be subtle and barely noticeable.
As for the work done by the Digital Domain team on the special features, you can get a sneak peek at those by checking out the trailer released by Sony Pictures yesterday.
Spider-Man: No Way Home releases on Digital on March 22 and physical platforms on April 12.