Spider-Man: No Way Home marked the triumphant return of the villains from the past Spider-Man films that we grew up and love. The actors who played them have become iconic for the roles and fans were very happy to see them come back for another turn. But you might be wondering, why didn't those characters have their own MCU versions? We now have an answer for that.
In a behind-the-scenes featurette for Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige discussed the reason why they avoided using the villains who appeared in the past Spider-Man films in the MCU iteration of the character and how the multiverse made it possible for them to bring back the actors to play the characters.
He said, "When we had the chance to bring Spider-Man into the MCU with Homecoming, it was really exploring two things that had never been explored before in the Spidey movies. One was making him much younger, that he's in his early years of high school and dealing with what it's like to be that young and to have these powers, and to really relish the high school setting. And the other one was that it's set within the broader Marvel universe and that there are other heroes there. So for the first few films, it was always, 'How do we do things that have never been done before?'"
"It did not occur to us to do a new Goblin story, or to do an Oscorp story, or to do Doc Ock, or anyone that had been done before, which is why Vulture and Mysterio were really the key characters," he continued. "Even as we were doing that — and I had been saying for years, even before anybody asked me what I thought — that you can't get better than Alfred Molina as Doc Ock. [I said] stepping into those shoes would be very, very difficult. And wouldn't it be fun to find a way, if you were ever going to bring Doc Ock back, it would have to be Alfred Molina. And in early development on this third Homecoming movie, we realized that thanks to the MCU, there was a way to do that."
We can pretty much say that Marvel made the right decision on avoiding using the villains that have been portrayed before in the past Spider-Man films since, after all, Spider-Man has a lot of villains in the comics and there's a variety of choices that they can choose that haven't made their big-screen debut yet.
It also paved the way to the multiversal storyline of No Way Home which ended up being successful and resonated to the audience as seen from all the responses that it has gotten. One of the appeals is the return of the same actors to play the villains and there's no doubt that they are iconic in those roles. Either way, it was a win-win for us fans and a lot are definitely looking forward to seeing whose villain is Spider-Man going to face next.
Also Read: Spider-Man: No Way Home Getting Oscar Push from Marvel and Sony
Spider-Man: No Way Home is still showing in theaters everywhere. You can also check out our streaming guide for the film here.
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