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Gadzooks! This is a movie that is jam-packed with big surprises, and somehow I managed to make it through four years without having any of them spoiled! And since even my usual template for MCU articles will spoil some of those surprises, I thought I should give readers a chance to turn back—I want the surprises to have the same impact on you as they had on me! continue
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Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, [Brian Bendis, Sara Pichelli, J. Michael Straczynski,] Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, and Jon Watts, 2021 So the setup for this is that in the previous Spider-Man movie, Mysterio had revealed to the world that Spider-Man was actually a high school kid named Peter Parker. In the first act, Peter goes to Doctor Strange to see whether he can go back in time to undo this, or, failing that, whether he can make the world forget. This had some precedent in the comics: during the “Civil War” event of 2006, Tony Stark had convinced Peter to publicly unmask, which led to villains targeting Peter’s family; ultimately, Aunt May got shot. This led to the “One More Day” arc by J. Michael Straczynski, the author of what are widely considered some of the worst storylines in Spider-Man’s history, in which Peter went to Doctor Strange to beg him to undo the chain of events that led to this. Strange says that even a Sorcerer Supreme can’t thwart fate, and Peter ends up making a deal with Mephisto (i.e., the devil) to get Aunt May back and to make the public forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man so that his family won’t be targeted again. Mephisto’s price is “the one thing in the universe that is truly greater than the sum of its parts and tastier than any single soul I could devour. […] I want your marriage.” Like I discussed in my Hawkeye article, a lot of the top brass at Marvel thought that Spider-Man had been such a successful character because he was a geeky younger guy scrambling for the rent money and plagued by girl troubles, but after years of different writers putting him through the usual narrative progression for such a character, the company was now publishing stories about a successful adult with a supermodel for a wife. Cue the cries of “Back to basics!” While the Peter Parker of the mainstream Marvel Universe (Earth‑616) wouldn’t be set back to age fifteen like the Peter Parker of the “Ultimate Universe” (Earth‑1610), “One More Day” did reset him to an underemployed single guy—not even a divorced guy, since his marriage was not simply ended but mystically erased. This got me wondering about the extent to which what I was about to see was also shaped by extradiegetic considerations. As Doctor Strange starts up his spell, it looks like we might be heading toward an ending in which Spider-Man, or at least the public’s awareness of him, is actually erased from the MCU, much as Thor was recently erased from the MU—but why? Was the contract to bring Spider-Man into the MCU about to run out? Was actor Tom Holland moving on to other things? Since the MCU borrows a lot from the Ultimate line, were they bringing in Miles Morales? Anyway—the spell goes haywire, Strange contains it, and we’re on to the second act… …in which Peter’s attempt to talk to a college admissions officer is interrupted by an ominous rumbling sound—and then, yikes! a metal tentacle! All right, let’s see the MCU version of Doctor Octopus! And it’s… Alfred Molina? The same guy who played Doc Ock in Spider‑Man 2 back in 2004? Okay, well, I guess they did bring back J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, so maybe they just thought they couldn’t improve on the casting? But this Doc Ock starts reciting lines from the 2004 movie that suggest he’d just now warped in from there. When he gets Peter’s mask off, he is taken aback: “You’re not Peter Parker!”—suggesting that he was expecting Tobey Maguire. Now, the idea of a Doctor Octopus from an alternate timeline showing up in the MCU is not inherently shocking—Loki and What If…? both suggested that as the MCU moved into the 2020s, the Multiverse was going to be a major focus. But this particular version was from a different studio. The two Amazing Spider-Man movies of the 2010s were explicitly a reboot, not a continuation, of the 2000s Spider-Man films, and this MCU Spider-Man series was a reboot of both. Worlds are colliding, Jerry! For the 2004 Doc Ock to show up in the MCU was like if The Dark Knight had begun with local gang leaders speaking in hushed whispers about the Joker and he strolls into their meeting and it’s Cesar Romero. And I finally had a firsthand sense of what a delightful shock it must have been for comics readers of the past who got to experience some of the landmarks in crossovers:
Marvel ended up launching its own system of numbered universes, as I detailed here, but there’s a difference between the sort of thing the What If…? series was doing, whipping up parallel worlds specifically for the purpose of adding to the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse, and what Spider-Man: No Way Home does, roping in pre-existing material that I’d assumed must be out of bounds. I was surprised enough to see Charlie Cox appear as Matt Murdock, since prior to the Hawkeye series I had seen no references to the five Netflix MCU shows in the movies or on other MCU TV shows, and I’d gathered that they had been rendered non-canonical just like the Helstrom show. But again, the Sony Spider-Man films were movies whose continuity the MCU had replaced. And I suppose something similar was true of Earth‑2 as well, but there are those extradiegetic considerations again. National Comics had the rights to the Jay Garrick stories; all Gardner Fox had to do was get permission from the higher-ups at one company in order to cast the Golden Age material as a different plane of reality in what would become the DC Multiverse. But what we see in this movie had to be the result of negotiations between the MCU stakeholders and a rival outfit whose Spider-Man films had been competing against the MCU just seven years earlier. The non-MCU The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was in theaters at the same time as the MCU Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And the filmmakers are very clever in the way they deploy the clearances they’ve secured. So Doc Ock shows up, and then he’s followed by the Green Goblin from the 2002 Spider-Man—and I thought, aha, it’s lucky for them that the ’02 Goblin wears a metallic mask, so they could put the Goblin in the film without having to get Willem Dafoe! And then a bunch of scenes go by, and we return to the Goblin thread, and they got Willem Dafoe. It turns out they have nearly all the villains from the pre-MCU Spider-Man movies: Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, Rhys Ifans’s Lizard, Jamie Foxx’s Electro. And yet I still wasn’t prepared for the moment when Spider-Man walks in and pulls off his mask and it’s Andrew Garfield. Bluh! It’s not just a villain roundup—the movie is adding alternate Spider-Men to the mix! And yet—again, showing that the filmmakers picked the right order for the revelations—even with Andrew Garfield right in front of me, I wasn’t expecting Tobey Maguire. I mean, in 2021 Tobey Maguire turned forty-six. And my understanding was that he’d retired from acting in 2014. And yet, at the very moment I was thinking “nahhh”, in walks Tobey Maguire. As for the actual content of the movie—I dunno, I guess it’s kind of interesting how it foregrounds the ethics of these movies. The basic plot is that Doctor Strange has the ability to send all the non-MCU characters back to their home universes, but for most of the villains, that’s a death sentence, as they were sucked into the MCU the instant before their respective demises. Strange is unbothered, saying that fate cannot be thwarted, but Aunt May insists that the villains need to be reformed, not just sent back to die, and Spider-Man fights Doctor Strange, and wins, to give them this opportunity. As I understand it, the ending sort of ends up taking an all-of-the-above approach: Strange returns, and the villains do get sent back, but they’re reformed first, so… they die in a state of grace or something? I get that this sort of thing was a big part of the plot of Hamlet but I’m not so sure I’m overly concerned with the condition of the Green Goblin’s soul as he warps back to die in 2002. Though now I’m picturing a new Hamlet movie in which the protagonist is joined by a digitally de-aged Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson. And of course, the fact that the MCU Spider-Man is forgotten by everyone at the end of the movie means that one final, extremely appropriate crossover was left on the table:
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