While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is practically bubbling with memorable scenes, none can match the recently released Spider-Man: No Way Home, which offers one iconic moment after another. But interestingly, one of the film’s finest moments, which left Marvel fans frantically hooting in the cinemas, was actually not at all impressive when screenwriters Chris McKenna and Eric Sommers sat down to pen the first draft.
We all know what happens in Spider-Man: No Way Home after Peter’s attempts to make the world forget his identity via Doctor Strange’s magic backfires. The fabric of reality takes a hit and villains from alternate universes make it into MCU’s Earth. While Strange manages to imprison them, ready to send them to their universes and back to their inevitable deaths, Peter saves them all as hopes to reform all of them.
Soon, being kindhearted blows up in Peter’s face as the villains betray him and in the ongoing chaos, Aunt May dies. Meanwhile, Ned and MJ end up finding Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s respective Peters (who were also summoned to MCU’s Earth because of Strange’s botched spell) when they go looking for their own friend. Then comes Spider-Man: No Way Home’s epic scene as the four make it to a dejected Peter (Holland) who is ready to give up and send the villains to their deaths. The alternate Parkers console Holland’s Peter by sharing that they too lost loved ones and give a heart-breaking explanation why Peter shouldn’t become vengeful as Aunt May’s death was not in vain.
But this iconic scene didn’t always pan out as it did. McKenna recently appeared on GoldDerby and revealed that initially, the scene involving the Spideys meeting for the first time was written in a way that it would have seemed “worthless” to MCU fans.
“It was incredible people that you get to work with, and they all came [together]. That scene would have been worthless — we didn’t have that scene in the first draft of the movie! It was just like, ‘These two guys show up, we’re going to help you.’ We knew that wasn’t going to work.” “When you’re working on this thing for a long time, you start digging in and finding out, ‘What’s the story really about?’ Luckily we had figured it out by the time we shot that scene.”
But despite the initial setbacks, the Emmy-nominated duo of Chris McKenna and Eric Sommers did what everyone expected from them- making history by penning MCU’s most phenomenal moment to date.
