Unused Spider-Man: No Way Home Art Shows Massive Changes to Green Goblin and Sandman
Spider-Man: No Way Home has been in theaters for over a month now, but there are still nuggets of information surrounding the blockbuster that have surprised fans. The billion-dollar film featured the return of a number of villains from past live-action Spider-Man movies, including Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn / Green Goblin and Thomas Haden Church's Flint Marko / Sandman. Both characters reprised their roles from the Sam Raimi-helmed trilogy of films, and No Way Home provided some new character beats for both. A new look at concept art from No Way Home concept artist Christian Cordella reveals how both characters were almost introduced in the film.
As Cordella's concept art reveals, Norman almost wore a different sort of green jacket as part of his deconstructed Green Goblin costume. Marko almost looked completely different as a civilian, with a puffy vest as opposed to his iconic striped shirt.
Green Goblin and Sandman were just two of the previous villains who came back into the fold in No Way Home, with Otto Octavius / Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Curt Conners / The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and Max Dillon / Electro (Jamie Foxx) also appearing in the film.
"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," co-writer Eric Sommers recently told Discussing Film. "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 currently playing in theaters.
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