By the time the credits roll on Spider-Man: No Way Home, the world has forgotten that Peter Parker exists and the wall-crawler is living by himself in a New York City apartment. We see that Peter is studying to get his GED, and with no more Stark Tech, he's created a classic red and blue costume to swing into action with (we're betting he was inspired by those other Spider-Men).
With that, the character has been brought more in line with his comic book counterpart than ever before. However, the way the movie concludes feels like it could just as easily be the end of Spider-Man's time in the MCU or a new beginning that sets the stage for another trilogy starring Tom Holland.
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, co-writer Erik Sommers shared his thoughts on the movie's final shots. "It’s ended in a place where it could feel like a satisfying to this particular Spider-Man, or it definitely could keep going," he acknowledges. "[Each] one of these movies has had a big thing from the previous to react to. To be a story engine. If there were to be another one, we have this big change at the end that would be a huge story engine to what comes next. I think it could be a satisfying conclusion or just another really fun, inciting incident for another story."
Fellow co-writer Chris McKenna describes it as "a fitting ending if it had to end this way," and explained that despite Peter's sacrifice and loss, he doesn't see him heading down the same dark route Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man did in the wake of Gwen Stacy's death in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
"Andrew Garfield went into bitterness and darkness. I don’t see that for this one. He’s hopeful. He has chosen this life. He could spill the beans and get MJ and Ned back and he could convince them of everything and have everything he wanted when he walked into Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. He could get it, but now he has a choice and he doesn’t make that choice because he knows ultimately there’s a sacrifice that has to be made if he’s going to be the person that May raised him to be."
"This is the responsibility that he now has to live with. In a lot of ways, this is the other two [Spider-Men] helping him get to a place where maybe they got to before he did. This is the great sacrifice," McKenna continues. "The death of May is the turning point in his life and really turns what it means to be Peter Parker and Spider-Man into a different place for him."
In a separate interview with Variety, the writers were asked what sort of problems Peter will face after the world forgets him. Does he vanish from photos? Does he no longer have a social security number? "We were like, do we do a ‘Back to the Future’ kind of thing where you see him fading out of photos?" Sommers recalls. "Does he still have a driver’s license or a passport?"
"It just led to more questions. We decided, let’s try to do it in the most satisfying way and just focus on the emotion of it. And then if people have questions about some of those details that didn’t get answered here, we’ll answer them hopefully in another movie somewhere down the line." McKenna adds: "Obviously, some sort of magical redaction has occurred. At the end of all this, we didn’t want a lot of people trying to do magical math in their head. People had these experiences, but they start forgetting the person they knew, but they were still affected by the events that happened."
There's a lot of ground for future movies to delve into Spider-Man's new status quo, though only time will tell whether Marvel Studios decides to fully explore the ramifications of Peter Parker being forgotten. In the comic books, unmasking was enough to restore someone's memories of who Spider-Man really is, but as far as even his closest friends are concerned, Peter doesn't exist now!