Spider-Man: No Way Home VFX Boss Explains How They Made Doc Ock Different

By Charlie Ridgely

One of the best live-action comic book villains of all time got a second chance in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Alfred Molina's Doc Ock, who originally appeared in Spider-Man 2 back in 2004, was one of the many past Spidey villains brought into the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the latest adventure, and he was the one most heavily featured in the promotional material. From the first trailer, fans could tell that Doc Ock looked a little different than he used to, but it was hard to put a finger on exactly why.

ComicBook.com sat down with Digital Domain VFX Supervisor Scott Edelstein to talk about Doc Ock's latest appearance. According to the VFX guru, Molina's character had to look a little different because of the evolution of technology, though the goal was always to be close to the original.

"Well, it starts that way. I think we want to look at those previous films, kind of pay homage to what they were," Edelstein explained. "And the original asset, we tried to get. A lot of the original assets in fact, from Sony, if they had had them around, but just, technology doesn't really work that way, right? Like over time that stuff is put on a tape somewhere, the formats are different or the version of software is different, and you can't really use it. What they did have was a practical model from the original film, in a glass case displayed at Sony. And so we were able to get access to that and scan it."

"So the arms have to look similar to the other movie. He's supposed to be pulled out of the moment that he dies at the end," he continued. "But it does want to be kind of upgraded and enhanced and made a little bit cooler for this film. So the texture of them, the materials are a bit different. We did a ton of research and had a whole bunch of reference online from those previous films, just to see how he interacts with them and what their personalities are and how they move. And we really tried to replicate a lot of that so it felt similar. But we had a little bit of creative freedom in what they looked like, and how we approached it. But with the nano tech involved as well, that gave us a little bit extra freedom to make them look just a little bit different, because they've got that red nano tech on them."

What did you think of Doc Ock's look in Spider-Man: No Way Home? Let us know in the comments!

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