Spider-Man: No Way Home celebrates two decades of the wall-crawler's big screen adventures in a way that's seen the movie exceed expectations both critically and commercially. Fans are going crazy over the threequel, and there are a lot of amazing moments that ensured they walked away happy once the credits rolled (that swing and Norman Osborn's "I'm something of a scientist myself" line).
Part of the reason these moments work so well is that the movie never really heads down the route of lazy fan-service, and the scenes which do re-use familiar dialogue or reference past events never feel forced.
Talking to Discussing Film, Spider-Man: No Way Home co-writer Erik Sommers explained why Peter Parker's story always had to be the priority. "I mean, you want to give everyone their due, and just as a fan, you want to see those people as those characters and have fun with them," he explains. "But at the end of the day, it’s a Spider-Man movie – you have to be telling the story of Peter Parker, and everything has to be in service of that. So there were a lot of painful decisions made, you know, we would have loved to have done this and that and “Oh, wouldn’t be great if these two villains could do this!” But it has to be in service of Peter’s journey, and you have to keep things moving."
"I mean, 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. But you don’t want to just do lazy fan service for its own sake because it’ll ring false at some point," Sommers continued.
"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."
This is definitely the right approach to "fan-service," and the proof is in the pudding with Spider-Man: No Way Home. The movie has really managed to strike a chord with hardcore fans and regular moviegoers alike, hence why it's become the first title since 2019's Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to earn upwards of $1 billion at the worldwide box office (we expect updated numbers later).
What was your favourite throwback or Easter Egg in Spider-Man: No Way Home?