Spider-Man: No Way Home brings back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield's versions of Peter Parker, giving fans the opportunity to learn what came next after Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. While it sounds like Maguire's web-slinger got his happy ending with Mary Jane, the death of Gwen Stacy clearly sent Garfield's down a dark path.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, No Way Home co-writer Chris McKenna shed some light on how he and co-writer Erik Sommers decided to pick up where Sam Raimi and Marc Webb left off with the two returning Spider-Men. As you might expect, that involved figuring out exactly how much of the fallout from those earlier movies they should include in this one.
"As writers, we kept saying, 'Where are these characters in their lives when they come into the movie?' Where is Tobey? We’re not de-agifying him. He’s a guy who is 43, who is entering this movie, and Andrew Garfield, where are they in their lives?" he explains. "The last time you saw Andrew Garfield, it was the death of Gwen, and that must have sent him down a dark spiral, maybe he never got out of. We don’t know, because there wasn’t a third movie that we saw. Where did he go? Maybe a really dark place."
"We wanted to be true to the characters in those movies. Really having conversations about specifying where they are, without giving away too much," McKenna continued. "Not coming in, spilling all the beans. 'Tobey’s Peter is running Peter Parker Industries!' You just wanted to have little hints of that without it being all this exposition as fan service."
The trade then asked how much input both actors had in exploring what came next for their respective takes on the characters, and it sounds like Maguire and Garfield had very different approaches.
"Tobey wanted to be very minimal about how much you know. Very, very minimal. Andrew really loved the idea of he’s still tortured over what happened in Amazing Spider-Man 2 and where that left him, and how they could bring that to Tom," the writer recalls. "Tobey especially has come through that darkness. We thought it was cool that Andrew’s Peter was still in the midst of that darkness."
Maguire seemed happy not to be too specific about what came next for his Peter, clearly preferring to leave it up to the imagination of fans. Garfield, on the other hand, understandably relished this opportunity to address the fallout of Gwen's death after being robbed of the opportunity to do so in The Amazing Spider-Man 3 (a movie fans are now campaigning to make a reality).
Will we see more of the original big screen Spider-Men? For now, that remains to be seen...