The development of the project that eventually became Spider-Man: No Way Home hit a significant roadblock in the summer of 2019, when Sony shockingly ended their working relationship with Marvel Studios and withdrew Tom Holland’s Peter Parker from Kevin Feige’s cinematic universe.
Those fences were mended in fairly short order, allowing the regular writing team of Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers to get back to the drawing board. Eventually, the third installment in the series snowballed into becoming a multiversal epic for the ages, drawing in villains from the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb franchises, but the scribes were determined to ensure that Peter’s journey never changed.
In an interview with Variety, McKenna and Sommers admitted that no matter the sweeping changes made to the narrative in terms of which character from what saga was showing up where to do what, the emotional throughline of the protagonist remained the same.
“You feel like he’s settling in, comfortable in his skin, and then boom, it all gets completely blown up because his identity is revealed. Now he’s just scrambling… So now he has to, again, struggle with what it means to be Peter Parker, what it means to be Spider-Man. It’s like therapy, talking about this stuff!”
There’s an awful lot going on Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it never loses sight of Peter as a person. He’s still just a kid trying to the right thing for everyone, and he makes plenty more mistakes along the way as he tries to fix ones he’d made in the past. It’s pretty complex for a grandstanding superhero blockbuster, but Holland’s phenomenal performance make it look like a breeze.
