Spider-Man: No Way Home VFX Boss Breaks Silence on the Trailer Removing Other Spidey Actors

Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s inclusion in Spider-Man: No Way Home could go down as one of the worst kept secrets in the modern era of Marvel movies. No matter how many times the actors denied it, set photos and reports online had most fans convinced that they’d be appearing in some capacity. The trailer for No Way Home erased what little doubt remained, as the final shot showed three villains charging at just one Spider-Man, and Lizard getting kicked in the face by a figure who wasn’t even there.

It was clear that some characters had been edited out of the shot and it didn’t take long for anyone to notice. During an interview with Befores and Afters, Chris Waenger, the Imageworks VFX Supervisor on No Way Home, opened up about the trailer cut.

“As filmmakers we are often asked to deliver WIPs and other various media to the marketing teams,” Waegner explained. “We pretty much give them what they’re requesting but we don’t see the final assembly until it’s released mainstream. I know the internet went crazy and there were many rumors about it.”

As expected, the actual film shows all three Spider-Men swinging in that scene together. The three Peter Parkers working together was far and away the highlight of the film for most fans, but figuring out how to assure that they looked different on-screen was a challenge for the VFX team.

“Being able to identify each individual Spider-Man was very important to both Jon [Watts] and Kelly [Port]. Early on it was quite challenging because their suits are pretty similar in tonal values and since our sequence takes place at night this only exacerbated their individual readability,” said Waegner. “It became pretty obvious once we started lighting shots what we had to do. We focused our efforts on really bringing forward each of the Spider-Mens physical personalities or their individual spider-style, if you will – how they swung, how they shoot webs, their physical proportions when they achieve an iconic pose. So our animation supervisor, Rich Smith, who has also worked on several Spider-Man films, had our animation team review the previous films. We studied clips of each actor and reviewed their individual spider-style from these films. We then layered in these signature performance characteristics so that each Spider-Man had their own unique style when seen next to each other.”

What did you think of Spider-Man: No Way Home? Which Spider-Man is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!