Willem Dafoe’s return as Norman Osborn/Green Goblin in Spider-Man: No Way Home turned heads. It’s been two decades since he last hopped on a glider and tossed a pumpkin bomb, but age hadn’t slowed him down one bit.
Of all the visiting villains, he proved the biggest threat to Spidey by far, with his Goblin persona refusing Peter Parker’s cure right up until the finale.
The character was an excellent choice to be the primary antagonist among No Way Home‘s rogues’ gallery, with his story continuing from 2002’s Spider-Man, building on what we know of the character from the comics, and ending with a moment of hope for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker.
And yet, courtesy of a new interview with writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, we know he wasn’t originally a lead player:
“This movie went through a rapid change. [Green Goblin] was not the main villain of this movie. For like the whole first version of the script, he was not the main villain. He was a villain. And then we lost other characters, and then we kept on going, ‘It has to be him. He’s the one who now is the antagonist of the movie. We have to make him the antagonist,”
So we were evolving the script as we were writing it and shooting it, and it was, ‘Oh, Goblin/Norman has to be the villain. How do we do that?’ And so he became the centerpiece of the movie that he was at first not the centerpiece of. Goblin was there, but he was not [the main villain].”
To me, it seems like a no-brainer that if Dafoe is in your movie, you don’t leave him on the sidelines, but they still needed to find something for him to do.
“Then it became clear to all of us, ‘Wait, no, he has to be the other side of May. He has to be the main villain of this.’ He has to have been given a second chance and he was still doing what he was doing in the first movie [2002’s Spider-Man], but in a darker way that now relates to our Peter Parker.”
Dafoe’s Goblin ended the story a broken man, his evil side finally(?) purged, distraught over the loss of his son Harry, and guilt-ridden for his actions after taking the serum. He was promptly sent back to the Raimiverse, and it seems unlikely we’ll see him again.
In some ways that’s a shame. Norman Osborn is one of the all-time great Marvel universe villains, and Dafoe could have been a fine permanent addition to the MCU. I suspect it won’t be long before we see another variant of Osborn coming our way though, perhaps with a team of Dark Avengers in tow.
