(Photograph courtesy of marvel.com)
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” is easily one of the most anticipated films of the year. Whether it’s due to the theories circulating the internet, or the excitement of seeing a familiar face in Marvel, fans have been talking about the movie nonstop, especially since the first official trailer dropped. But does the third installment of the MCU Spider-Man live up to its hype? Not only does it surpass expectations, but it once again puts viewers in a mindset since they haven’t experienced since Avengers: Endgame, and changes the MCU as we know it.
***Major “Spider-Man: No Way Home” spoilers ahead!***
It was clear from the trailers that No Way Home was going to be like no other Marvel movie that had fans had seen in the past. We’ve seen crossovers in the form of cameos and Avengers movies, but for the first time, trailers revealed that Marvel had a very different kind of crossover prepared. Prior to “Captain America: Civil War,” any past version of the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man that we saw had no affiliation with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Both Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy with Tobey Maguire, and Marc Webb’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” movies with Andrew Garfield were part of entirely separate universes. Early trailers of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” revealed that villains from both prior Spider-Man universes were going to be in the movie… and that’s not all they included. Not one, not two, but all three versions of Spider-Man appear in the movie to fight alongside each other to defend the MCU from past Spider-Man villains, along with a cameo of Matt Murdock from Netflix’s “Daredevil.” But how does that change the MCU forever?
The appearance of so many past characters proved that this movie is going to burst the multiverse wide open, a theory that had been dropped in the MCU before, most notably in Wandavision and Loki. While past mentions of the multiverse were more or less just that, mentions or small glimpses into the possibility, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” exposed the true potential of what the multiverse could mean. The only limitations lie within who currently has the copyrights to various Marvel characters, and with Disney owning a vast majority of those characters now, the options of expanding the MCU are limitless. There are no rules or restrictions because, in the words of Doctor Stephen Strange, we know “surprisingly little” about the multiverse. If characters from the entirely different universes can be pulled into the current MCU, it opens up a completely different world of potentialities, including the possibility of bringing back characters that we know to be dead. It doesn’t stop there either. This also creates a perfect segue to introduce entirely new characters, like the Fantastic Four and X-Men, without really having to explain where the characters have been in past MCU movies.
Mentions of the multiverse aren’t only contained in the movie itself. It continues into one of the after-credit scenes, which is a glimpse at “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” in which Doctor Strange realizes that just because one problem with the multiverse is fixed, it doesn’t mean all of them are. He seeks help from Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, who is known for her ability to shape and change reality. The way that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” leads into “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” is just further proof that the MCU is far from being done with its exploration of the multiverse, and the potential it can bring to the theaters. Right now, all fans can do is wait and see how the MCU explodes and expands, but with so many mentions of the multiverse, it’s clear that Disney is only getting started.
Check out the trailer!
Written by Ashley Laney
Hi, I’m Lynn, and I Make.
Props, Cosplay, Scale Models, Home Projects, and just about anything else that involves me Making.
A positive podcast about video games. Chris and Ashley go over the video games we love. Updated biweekly.
Chris and Lynn
Evan Conroy
Ron Peterson
Join our Patreon family