By now, we're sure you know Spider-Man: No Way Home brings back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as their respective versions of Peter Parker. While the former has seemingly found happiness with Mary Jane Watson, the latter is still grieving after the traumatic death of Gwen Stacy.
Meeting his fellow Spider-Men has a positive effect on the Amazing web-slinger, though, and it feels like this Peter is in a much better place by the time all is said and done. It no doubt helps that he saves MJ from falling to her death, thereby finding a small sliver of redemption for past mistakes.
Talking to Variety, writer Chris McKenna said this about the final act's memorable scene. "There was an animatic of all these different things [potentially] happening in the finale," he recalls. Garfield's Spidey saving MJ "was one of the ones that we saw and were like, ‘How are we not doing something like that?'"
McKenna and his fellow writer Erik Sommers talked about the scene on the rooftop with the three Peters discussing those immortal words: "With great power there must also come great responsibility." Sommers explains that, "There was a big discussion of how much to use that phrase. Those words are so loaded. You have to be very careful about where and when you employ them."
"We had decided to have May say it to Peter, but would we bring it back as something that helps the three of them identify this uncanny cosmic link that they have? Or would that be too much to hear it again? Ultimately, the team decided, let’s hear it." McKenna adds, "We could really lean into, for instance, Webb-verse Peter having troubles — he’s in a dark place in his own life."
The Spider-Man: No Way Home scribes did such an amazing job with Garfield's Peter that there's already a very vocal campaign online for him to be given the chance to reprise the role. If so, we're hoping it's not The Amazing Spider-Man 3 Sony originally had planned (it involved a formula to raise the dead) because that wasn't going to be a good movie in any way, shape, or form.
If this was it for his Spider-Man, though, it's fair to say Garfield managed to go out on a high.