Spider-Man: No Way Home Writers Reveal How They Avoided Fan Service From Previous Movies

By Jamie Jirak

Spider-Man: No Way Home hit theaters last week, and it ended up having the second-highest opening weekend at the box office after Avengers: Endgame. Not only is the new Marvel movie shattering box office records, but it is currently "Certified Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes. A big draw for fans was the cast, especially considering there were so many rumors surrounding the movie for over a year. Warning: Spoilers Ahead! Not only did Alfred Molina return to his role as Doc Ock from Spider-Man 2, but Jamie Foxx returned as Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Willem Dafoe as Green Goblin from the 2002 Spider-Man. However, the biggest surprise was the appearances by former Spider-Men actors, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. During a recent interview with Discussing Film, writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers talked about balancing the cameos and avoiding too much fan service. 

"Very carefully," Sommers replied when asked how the divided up the actors' screentime. "Because, I mean, you want to give everyone their due, and just as a fan, you want to see those people as those characters and have fun with them. But at the end of the day, it's a Spider-Man movie – you have to be telling the story of Peter Parker, and everything has to be in service of that. So there were a lot of painful decisions made, you know, we would have loved to have done this and that and 'Oh, wouldn't be great if these two villains could do this!' But it has to be in service of Peter's journey, and you have to keep things moving. There were definitely a lot of what we call 'little darlings' – little moments and things that you really just love – but sometimes you have to let them go."

"I mean, it's a balancing act because we love those previous movies, the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb ones, and we want to pay homage to them and make the fans happy," Sommers continues. "But you don't want to just do lazy fan service for its own sake because it'll ring false at some point. It's a balancing act and at every point, again, you have to be thinking about the story. So if you really want to hear this villain say the line that he said in that other movie, you can't let that drive you in terms of finding a moment for that. If you just go looking for that and you spend all this time, you're going to end up writing some scene that maybe doesn't even need to be in the movie. You just have to keep focused on telling Peter Parker's story, and then hope that you find opportunities for those moments in there. We were working with a lot of smart and talented people, and just poring over these moments again and again, crafting things and trying to find those moments where we could include that kind of stuff in a way that felt like it was organic. We weren't just doing it for its own sake."

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now playing in theaters. 

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