Spider-Man: No Way Home follows Peter Parker as his attempts to hide his secret identity from the world leads to him battling villains from alternate realities. They're familiar to fans as the bad guys who plagued the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions of the wall-crawler, of course, but this very nearly wasn't the premise of Marvel Studios' third Spider-Man movie.
Talking to The Wrap, writer Chris McKenna revealed that the return of these villains was originally going to be teased in a post-credits scene setting the stage for Spider-Man 4.
"We go, ‘OK, we know that we’re dealing with the fallout from that. What would happen?'" McKenna said of Spidey's identity being revealed. "And that led us down different story roads that were not this story. And then, I don’t know if it was Kevin [Feige’s] idea, the idea of doing something with the other villains and teasing that at the very end [of the movie], I think in a tag was floated."
"So we were coming up with different storylines that would just sort of write towards a tag like that," he adds. "So inevitably we were like, ‘What if Kraven? What if [Other Villains?] and we were kicking around a lot of different ideas and then finally one day, for various reasons – there were reasons why we couldn’t do certain storylines – I think it was Kevin who goes, ‘Remember that idea with all the villains that we were talking about for a tag? That Sinister Six idea? Why don’t we just do it in the movie? Make this movie be about that?’ and then that just sort of blew everything open."
It's crazy to think that Spider-Man: No Way Home was almost Spider-Man 4, with this third movie likely pitting Peter against Kraven the Hunter instead of that sinister quintet of villains. McKenna later revealed that the idea of including Doctor Strange had been floated around from early on, so we're guessing that spell might have come nearer the end of the movie to set up "No Way Home."
Ultimately, we're glad things played out the way they did as the movie we got has set the stage for an exciting new MCU future for Tom Holland's wall-crawler. What that looks like remains to be seen, though we're banking on a comic-accurate take on the hero that brings Spidey more in line with the source material. Fingers crossed that leads to a battle with Kraven the Hunter after all, eh?
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