*SPOILER ALERT! This article contains major spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home!*
Now that Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) is playing in theaters, audiences have been showing up in record-breaking numbers to see what is arguably the biggest movie of the year! The proverbial feather in the already phenomenal cap of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man: No Way Home sees Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in a multi-versal team up with both of the previous live-action iterations of Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. Together, they take on five of the biggest and baddest villains that the wallcrawler has ever dealt with on the big screen!
The film marks the third big collaboration between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios on a Spider-Man solo film and further proves why their partnership is so important to the property itself. Spider-Man: No Way Home is a love letter to everything that makes Spider-Man great and a massive celebration of everything that the Spider-Man films have done over the last two decades. But what if it did even more than that? What if it even brought a little bit of these past films back in an even more literal way?
The Amazing Spider-Foes
For fans, it is fantastic to see the return of so many familiar faces from the previous Spider-Man films. It brought a larger sense of closure to both of Sony’s previous live-action Spider-Man stories and even closed out a major chapter for the current Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Seeing the return of iconic villains like The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and (a somehow much cooler version) of Electro was a treat for longtime fans of the Spider-Man films, as these particular versions were thought to be part of a completely separate universe from the MCU rather than just simply villains from days gone by. That all changed due to one massively mixed-up spell courtesy of Doctor Strange that managed to pull heroes and villains alike into the MCU proper for what may somehow be an even more ambitious crossover than anything Marvel has done before.
While each of these villains received a visual upgrade for their introduction to the MCU, several of them were never even really on set! Both Sandman and The Lizard were recreated entirely through the use of CGI, with Sandman sporting his unnatural “made of sand” look and The Lizard… well… being a giant lizard-man the whole time. It turns out that while actors Thomas Haden Church and Rhys Ifans did return to voice their characters, both of them didn’t have to do too much else for the film. According to The Direct, any face-time scenes of their characters were recreated using recycled footage from their previous Spider-Man films.
In the final battle of the climactic third act of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Peters (Peter 1, Peter 2, and Peter 3) are doing their best to cure their respective villains and potentially save them from themselves, which is where the recycled footage from both Spider-Man 3 (2007) and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) comes into play.
When Tobey Maguire’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man cures The Sandman and we see a brief glimpse of Thomas Haden Church’s Flint Marko, that footage is actually from Spider-Man 3 (2007)! The footage in question particularly comes from the scene in the sewers of New York City, just as Sandman is being dissolved in a puddle of water. Rather than melting away into nothingness, the footage was reworked to show Sandman re-shaping into his human form.
Similarly, when Tom Holland’s MCU Spider-Man manages to cure The Lizard only a few moments later, audiences are treated to a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment of Rhys Ifans as Doctor Curt Connors as seen in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). We mean that literally. The footage of Ifans was actually recycled from the exact same moment from the finale of The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) where The Lizard is seen losing his scales and turning back into his human form. The footage used here looks to have been an alternate take rather than the exact identical footage as seen in his previous appearance.
While they may not have been physically present for most of the film, their voices filling in their respective larger-than-life characters leads to both Thomas Haden Church and Rhys Ifans never feeling like they are missing. There has yet to be any reason given as to why the choice was made to have Sandman and The Lizard be rendered entirely with CGI and archival footage.
If we had to guess, it was likely due to a combination of things. Whether it was scheduling availability, the fact that this film was shot during a pandemic, or simply aging (it had been fourteen years since Thomas Haden Church had to be in tip-top shape to play Sandman and a decade since Ifans had played Doctor Connors), at the end of the day it was great that both actors were able to reprise these iconic roles. Overall, only around ten seconds of archival footage ended up being used for Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), so most casual viewers would probably never even notice!
Do you wish we had seen more of Rhys Ifans and Thomas Haden Church in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)? Or do you think the right choice was made to keep them fully computer-generated? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below and be sure to stick around Geek Anything for more Spider-Man updates!
