The secret is out: Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield swing through the Spider-Verse to teach Tom Holland a thwip or two in Spider-Man: No Way Home. And they're not alone: a wayward magic spell cast by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) brings multiversal trespassers into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including sinister supervillains Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and Electro (Jamie Foxx). In a new interview with visual effects and animation online magazine befores & afters, Sony Pictures Imageworks animators break down the great responsibility of the VFX behind bringing together Spider-Man (Holland), the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (Maguire), and the Amazing Spider-Man (Garfield).
"It was a very exciting opportunity to work on this film, having worked on quite a few of the previous Spider-Man films while being at Imageworks," visual effects supervisor Chris Waegner, whose credits include 2004's Spider-Man 2 and 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man, told befores & afters. "Having worked with each one of the actors and each one of the directors, each of them brought their own style to the franchise and to the big screen for the fans. It's such a passionate fan base which spans across many different age and gender groups."
Waegner added, "There will be children seeing this film with Tom Holland as Spider-Man for the first time, while there are folks who are older, maybe comic book fans, who originally saw Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man on the big screen, or years later saw another installment with Andrew Garfield in that role. It was very important to us to do the franchise justice. I know director Jon Watts and VFX Supervisor Kelly Port were equally as passionate about this franchise."
Due to technological advancements since the last appearance of Maguire's web-slinger (in 2007's Spider-Man 3) and Garfield's wall-crawler (in 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2), Waegner and Imageworks rebuilt their digital Spider-Men assets and referenced older models for proportions of the character builds.
"It became clear we had to start over and rebuild new Spider-Men. Another key decision in building the new Spider-Men was that the actor's physical appearance had changed as they aged," Waegner said. "Luckily for us, the studio has maintained its in-depth photographic history of what the original suits look like for both Tobey and Andrew for our build process."
Because the climactic final battle at the Statue of Liberty takes place at night with a trio of Spider-Men who are visually similar, two of them clad in dark red and blue costumes, "We focused our efforts on really bringing forward each of the Spider-Men's 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," Waegner revealed. "We then layered in these signature performance characteristics so that each Spider-Man had their own unique style when seen next to each other."
See the gallery below for new images from Spider-Man: No Way Home, now playing exclusively in theaters.