For a month back in 2019, Spider-Man fans were disappointed about what his live-action future might be, as Disney and Sony ended their partnership to develop films focusing on the Wall-Crawler, with writers Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna also having to consider this fallout while developing Spider-Man: No Way Home. With Marvel Cinematic Universe connections at least somewhat off the table, the pair wanted to focus more on how the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home impacted Peter Parker, on top of all the other struggles a teenager might face at this point in their life. Luckily, the dispute between the studios was resolved, which then allowed the writers to layer in additional elements on top of the core components of Peter’s more grounded struggles.
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“We knew that we were saddled with the idea of his identity being revealed,” McKenna detailed to DiscussingFilm. “We didn’t know, like you said, whether this was going to be another Sony-Marvel movie or not, whether it was solely going to be Amy Pascal producing, and if we were going to be brought on as writers, how would we tackle that without working with Marvel and the MCU? We did know that there were going to be all these repercussions [from Far From Home]. Would it be Peter getting arrested? Would it be Peter on the run? Would he be a fugitive? Would he be going to school or not for his senior year? Would it be under the whole spotlight of everyone as he was trying to make his way through senior year at Midtown? Kind of like how it ended up being in [No Way Home].”
He continued, “There were definitely a lot of questions that we had because we didn’t know if we were going to be able to use any of the MCU characters. So we started kicking around ideas, we definitely had some ideas that we were talking about with Pascal and Sony before the Disney deal went through. But, really, it was coming from where we had left Peter at the last movie. And knowing that we were heading into his senior year, we wanted to come at it in a real way of Peter Parker having real teenage problems. You know, he just got his first real girlfriend and now the whole world knows his identity and thinks he’s a terrible person. So we were really piling up his problems. The whole idea of how he was going to finish his senior year… under the possibility of being tried for murder, for multiple felonies, that was something we definitely played around with.”
With Doctor Strange playing such a significant role in No Way Home, it would seem as though the dispute between the studios impacted the jumping-off point for the story, while the resolution of the dispute then allowed the writers to elevate that initial approach to all-new heights and fold into it elements from multiple studios and iterations of Spider-Man. Not only did this resolution impact this film, but reports claim that Sony and Disney are already at work to develop more adventures for Tom Holland’s take on Peter Parker.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is in theaters now.
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