Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh are the year’s best movie duo. The two have been hitting all the mandatory stops of the internet to promote their new romance film We Live in Time, but, with their shared Marvel Cinematic Universe history, they’ve been unable to escape what may be the ultimate superhero question: who would win in a fight?
“Here we go!,” Garfield mused when the topic came up in a game of Agree to Disagree on LADbible TV’s YouTube channel — a segment many a famous Hollywood twosome have participated in. Most recently, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman put on a lively display as they discussed matters as controversial and existential as the sexiness of the Australian accent and whether Blake Lively could do better than her husband. The most viewed episode of the web series, however, incidentally remains the one featuring the heir to Garfield’s Spider-Man title, Tom Holland, and his MJ, Zendaya.
As for whether Pugh’s Yelena Belova could beat her co-star’s Spidey in a fight, Garfield has it pretty clear. “Spider-Man would absolutely [win],” the 41-year-old nonchalantly shrugged after arguing there is no realistic context where this face-off could occur. Come on, man, Marvel has pitted Peter against all kinds of weird opponents… Fighting a Thunderbolt sounds absolutely reasonable to us.
Pugh didn’t go down without a fight, contesting that her character may not have a superpower but she’s great at everything she does. “She has weapons,” the actress pointed out, to which Garfield countered “Spider-Man can have weapons if he wants.” In the end, though, the conversation dispersed and the two just wound up agreeing that Yelena and Peter would only ever fight if it was in a friendly wrestle and then the winner wouldn’t really matter.
The on-screen lovers may not be invested in seeing their MCU counterparts come face to face, but we definitely are. With chemistry as great as they’ve proven to have in We Live in Time, it will be criminal if Pugh and Garfield never share a scene again, and seeing as they’re already in the same franchise, we really need Feige to hit his little buttons and pull his little strings and make this happen.
We know when Pugh’s next MCU appearance will be. She’s reprising the role of Yelena in May of next year when Thunderbolts* officially hits theaters after multiple release date delays. In Marvel’s version of The Suicide Squad, Pugh will be teaming up with the likes of Sebastian Stan’s Bucky and David Harbour as her on-screen dad who we met in 2021’s Black Widow.
As for Garfield, it’s been rumored he might dust off the red and blue suit again for the currently untitled Spider-Man 4, though we struggle to think of a scenario where this hypothetical second multiversal team-up could live up to the monumental hype of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
We would, however, like to see both characters make an appearance in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday which is also rumored to feature evil multiversal versions of the original Avengers, including Yelena’s dead sister Natasha, who we’re sure she’d like to see again, regardless of her origins. Meanwhile, Garfield’s Spider-Man can lend a helping hand to Tom Holland, because it sounds like the good Avengers will need all the help they can get to beat Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom.
For now, we’ll be swooning over this gorgeous duo not as Yelena and Peter but as Almut and Tobias in We Live in Time, opening nationwide on Friday, Oct. 18. Read our review of the film here.
