After what amounted to a two-decade hiatus, Willem Dafoe zoomed backed onto the superhero scene late last year as the Green Goblin, serving as the primary antagonist to Peter Parker (Tom Holland) and his crew within Spider-Man: No Way Home. As it turns out, however, ol’ Norman Osborn wasn’t always the first choice to be the main villain in the movie. Despite being involved in some capacity since the earliest scripts of the movie, he wasn’t always the big cheese according to screenwriter Chris McKenna.
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During an awards season chat with Gold Derby, McKenna revealed the film’s first draft had an entirely different villain, though he wouldn’t name exactly who it was.
“This movie went through a rapid change. [Green Goblin] was not the main villain of this movie. For like the whole first version of the script, he was notย theย main villain. He wasย aย villain. And then we lost other characters, and then we kept on going, ‘It has to be him. He’s the one who now is the antagonist of the movie. We have to make him the antagonist,” the writer told the website.
As the writer’s room continued to develop the movie, Dafoe’s Osborn always seemed to emerge at the pick of who should be the one big bad guy.
“So we were evolving the script as we were writing it and shooting it, and it was, ‘Oh, Goblin/Norman has to be the villain. How do we do that?’ And so he became the centerpiece of the movie that he was at first not the centerpiece of. Goblin was there, but he was not [the main villain],” he added.
McKenna concluded, “Then it became clear to all of us, ‘Wait, no, he has to be the other side of May. He has to be the main villain of this.’ He has to have been given a second chance and he was still doing what he was doing in the first movie [2002’sย Spider-Man], but in a darker way that now relates to our Peter Parker.ย
Spider-Man: No Way Homeย is now in theaters.
More Spider-Man: No Way Home Coverage
- If There’s a Live-Action Spider-Verse, There Needs to Be a Ben Reilly
- Back Issues: Daredevil Returns For a Classic Marvel Team-Up
- How Spider-Man: No Way Home Could Set Up Miles Morales’ MCU Debut
- 9 Spider-Man Villains We Still Want to See in Live-Action
- How the Hell Did Sony Get Spider-Man’s Movie Rights Anyway?
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