Spoilers ahoy for Spider-Man: No Way Home, so consider yourself warned.
It goes without saying that Sam Raimi’s fingerprints are all over Spider-Man: No Way Home, with several of the actors he cast including Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina and Thomas Haden Church returning to the fold, while the story ties directly into Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which is of course being helmed by Raimi.
Plenty of fans are of the opinion that Tom Holland’s third solo outing is the best live-action blockbuster that the iconic superhero has ever been a part of, but there’s a large number who disagree, citing Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 as the benchmark that still hasn’t been beaten throughout the Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield or Holland eras.
Doctor Octopus references his classic “the power of the sun in the palm of my hand” line more than once, but there’s also another, more subtle callback to Spider-Man 2 in No Way Home. During an interaction with Maguire’s Peter, Molina says that he’s all grown up, to which Raimi’s Spidey replies, “I’m trying to do better”.
In Spider-Man 2, Otto Octavius remarks that Dylan Baker’s Curt Connors called Peter brilliant but lazy, to which he also replied, “I’m trying to do better”, and you’d hope so after fourteen years of spouting the same mantra. It’ll take multiple viewings to uncover every Easter Egg buried in No Way Home, but audiences are clearly on board with that.
