Director Jon Watts, known for helming Spider-Man: No Way Home, recently reflected on one of the film’s biggest creative pivots — the reveal of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as alternate Spider-Men. During a conversation at the Mediterrane Film Festival, Jon explained how early plans to introduce the iconic web-slingers during a tragic moment were completely reworked after he came across eerily accurate fan predictions online.
Speaking to Collider, Jon shared how the initial plan was to introduce the older Peter Parkers during a crucial emotional scene — right after Aunt May’s death. The moment was imagined as a somber one, where “Peter’s going to be sad because Aunt May has just died, and that the portals are going to open, and the two Spider-Men are going to step out.” He noted that “there had been rumors that Tobey and Andrew were going to be in the movie,” even while the team was still filming and finalizing the script.
At the time, Jon had only a rough vision for the setting of this team-up. “It’s probably a rooftop somewhere. It’s all sort of hazy. You’re still trying to figure it out,” he said. But that vague vision quickly hit a roadblock when he stumbled upon fan theories and concept art online. “Then I was on Reddit, and I was looking at people who had already made fan art of, ‘This is probably what it’s going to be like when the two Spider-Men get revealed,’” he said. “It was on a rooftop. It was sad, two Doctor Strange portals were open and two Spider-Men are stepping out. I was like, ‘Well, we can’t do that. If that’s exactly what everyone thinks we’re going to do, we absolutely can’t do that’,” he added.
That realisation led to a dramatic shift in how the reveal played out onscreen. Instead of emerging together on a rooftop, the alternate Spider-Men are brought into the story through Ned Leeds, who inadvertently summons them using Doctor Strange’s sling ring — inside his family home.
“I was like, ‘What does no one expect that we’re going to do? What’s something that no one’s going to see coming?’” Jon recalled. “I was like, ‘Probably having the two Spider-Men appear at Ned’s Filipino grandma’s house in Queens. I don’t think anyone was doing fan art of that on Reddit’,” he added.
Jon credited the inclusion of Ned’s grandmother, played by Mary Rivera, as the unexpected twist that gave the scene its charm. “It was the middle of the pandemic, so we had to find a lady and fly her from Hawaii to Atlanta to shoot all of this,” he said. Changing the setting, he added, allowed him to subvert fan expectations in the most satisfying way. “So, as soon as you put her in that scene and change the location, now I feel like I’ve double-crossed the audience in the best way, where they’re seeing everything that they were hoping that they would see in a way that they were never expecting they were going to,” he concluded.
