In a recent interview with Variety, Spider-Man: No Way Home scribes Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers opened up about how the pandemic affected their writing process. They revealed that their first ideas for Doctor Strange’s role in No Way Home were immediately changed after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness got delayed.
Originally, the Doctor Strange sequel was set to be released first before the third Tom Holland-led installment, which would have seen Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sorcerer Supreme as a voice of reason because they were first trying to incorporate things based on what’s happening in Sam Raimi’s sequel.
“We were actually working off of things that were happening in Doctor Strange 2, and trying to incorporate them into our script,” McKenna said. “When we started writing, [Strange] knows firsthand the dangers of screwing with these things. Then we changed it so he was a person who doesn’t know that much about the multiverse. But that makes it even more frightening, to start fooling around with these things, because it’s the fear of the unknown. Either way, he was the voice of reason going, ‘You don’t mess with the fate of an individual’ — and Peter Parker being naive enough to go, ‘Why not? Why can’t we save these people?’”
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The film currently holds a worldwide gross of over $1 billion and has become Sony’s highest-grossing film of all time. According to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures are already actively beginning to develop their next Spider-Man film together.
Spider-Man: No Way Home sees the return of Tom Holland as the beloved titular wall-crawler, along with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange. The threequel also features the return of Spider-Man vets J.K. Simmons (Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy) as J. Jonah Jameson, Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2) as Doc Ock, Willem Dafoe (Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy) as the Green Goblin, Jamie Foxx (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) as Electro, Thomas Haden Church (Spider-Man 3) as Sandman, and Rhys Ifans (The Amazing Spider-Man) as Lizard.
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Joining them are Zendaya (Euphoria, Dune) as MJ, Jacob Batalon (50 States of Fright) as Ned, Marisa Tomei (The King of Staten Island) as Aunt May, Jon Favreau as Happy, Tony Revolori (The French Dispatch) as Flash, and Hannibal Buress (Tag) as Coach Wilson.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was directed by Jon Watts from a screenplay written by Chris McKenna, and Erik Sommers.
