Having become Sony’s highest-grossing movie ever in the space of two weeks, Spider-Man: No Way Home would be considered a runaway success under any circumstances, never mind an era that’s been defined by the worst global health crisis in generations.
Even though leaks and spoilers weren’t too hard to find if you actively went looking for them, Marvel Studios and Sony did a perfectly acceptable job in trying to keep things under wraps for as long as possible. Of course, it was the worst-kept secret in the business that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield would be returning for multiversal cameo appearances, but in a rarity for the MCU, neither of the two post-credits scenes overtly set up future projects or storylines that we didn’t already know about.
However, writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers admitted to Variety that they had to rein themselves in while trying to come up with the stingers, revealing that they threw around all sorts of wild and crazy ideas involving Maguire and Garfield.
“We even talked about, ‘Oh, we could do a tag with this one! We could do a tag with that one!’… Can we do a TV show with the two of them traveling around in a van solving mysteries?… Like, ‘No, you weren’t supposed to say that.’ We are doing Tobey and Andrew in a van going from town to town!”
A tease for Tom Hardy’s next outing as Venom and the first footage from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was a suitable compromise, leaving the door wide open for the next standalone Spider-Man blockbuster to begin with something of a clean slate.
