Spider-Man: No Way Home Gets New Short Film of Ned Exploring Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield Universes

By Jenna Anderson

After charming audiences and exceeding box office expectations when it debuted in theaters late last year, Spider-Man: No Way Home is finally headed to a release on home video. The blockbuster film shocked fans with the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield's incarnations of Spider-Man, who joined forces with Tom Holland's incarnation of the character. While No Way Home mainly showed the three within the main MCU universe, a new teaser hyping up the home release traverses Maguire and Garfield's previous universes in a clever way. The teaser is framed as a fake trailer for Ned's Bogus Adventure, imagining a film where Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) uses his newfound magic abilities to travel to the other universes.

The teaser largely uses archival footage to place Ned in the universes, as he visits moments such as Maguire's Peter in his very first wrestling match in Spider-Man, and Garfield's Peter graduating from high school in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Still, it's a pretty charming way to lean into the multiverses within the film, and even features cameos from Martin Starr's Roger Harrington and J.B. Smoove's Julius Dell.

While debated about at length prior to No Way Home's debut, the return of Maguire and Garfield definitely pleasantly surprised fans, and offered an opportunity to explore their characters at different points in their lives and superhero careers.

"The last time you saw Andrew Garfield, it was the death of Gwen, and that must have sent him down a dark spiral, maybe he never got out of," co-writer Chris McKenna explained in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "We don't know, because there wasn't a third movie that we saw. Where did he go? Maybe a really dark place. We wanted to be true to the characters in those movies. Really having conversations about specifying where they are, without giving away too much. Not coming in, spilling all the beans. 'Tobey's Peter is running Peter Parker Industries!' You just wanted to have little hints of that without it being all this exposition as fan service."

"Tobey wanted to be very minimal about how much you know. Very, very minimal," McKenna continued. "Andrew really loved the idea of he's still tortured over what happened in Amazing Spider-Man 2 and where that left him, and how they could bring that to Tom. "We can empathize with you. We do know what you are going through. If anyone in the world knows what you're going through, it's us." But also, "We can be beacons." Tobey especially has come through that darkness. We thought it was cool that Andrew's Peter was still in the midst of that darkness. They weren't just here to go, "Two awesome Jedi knight heroes who show up and are going to help you take down the bad guys." They are going through their own things. We were trying to write up to the characters that they did such a great job of creating and really being true to those characters and those stories and those worlds so that it didn't feel like we were doing curtain call, fan-service."

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now available to purchase on digital platforms, Blu-ray, and digital.

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