MCU Spider-Man's Iron Spider Suit Almost Had a More Comic-Accurate Look
Avengers: Endgame is now firmly in 2019 as the Marvel Cinematic Universe moves into the 2020 [...]
Avengers: Endgame is now firmly in 2019 as the Marvel Cinematic Universe moves into the 2020 slate. But, concept art continues to trickle out from the artbook from the hit film. Spider-Man's Iron Spider look from Infinity War and Endgame almost looked a whole lot different. The comic version of the suit made famous during the Civil War event was about to be a major influence on the design. But, as people speculated when the murmurs about the suit first appeared, the company probably didn't want to make too many alterations to the classic look the hero has sported in most of his cinematic adventures. That makes a bit of sense because the sort of easily identifiable costume can be hard to come by when adapting movies in this genre. Spider-Man is one of the easy layups because of how popular the character is. So, going with the design the sort of references the classic suit while adding all the bells and whistles was a nice compromise. Artist Ryan Meinerding shared some cool photos of this initial design on Instagram.
When the epic crossover concluded, many wondered if the hero would be going back to the classic look and then Tom Holland popped up in the new black and red suit on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Then some photos of the Stealth suit in Spider-Man: Far From Home appeared. This ended up being a major surprise although it fit with what people were hearing about the film. So, it looks like the Marvel movies will be taking a page from the comics after all with a bunch of different costumes but reverting back to something resembling the classic look.
Jon Watts talked about the practical nature of the Homecoming suit back in 2017. "It's 100% practical when we're shooting," Watts said. "[Tom Holland] has a full suit that he wears whenever possible. And then, what we do is we go in and then just sort of clean it up. You paint out the seams, you paint out zippers, and if there's too many wrinkles in a particular part, you paint that out. Then, you animate the eyes."
"Well, at Marvel, they have this amazing visual development team," Watts continued. "Their main job is designing the characters. They did most of the work for the suit for Civil War, so that it was ready, but the inspiration was always the original [Steve] Ditko illustrations."
"But the lead concept artist there, this guy, Ryan Meinerding," Watts added. "This is before I came on, but [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] told me this story and I love it: I think Spider-Man is Ryan's favorite character and he asked Ryan, 'What would you do if you could do anything? Let's say Tony Stark built a Spider-Man suit, what would you do?' He said, 'I'd have the eyes move.' Because in the comics, the artists have always drawn the eyes with different shapes to show his emotion, but you've never been able to do that in the movies because there was no reason to. But by having this tech angle on it, you weirdly can get closer to the spirit of the comics by having these expressive eyes."