At this point, it’s clear that Spider-Man: No Way Home is a bonafide blockbuster for Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures. The film, which hit theaters on December 17, is now second only to Marvel’s Infinity Saga conclusion, Avengers: Endgame (2019), in regard to box office debut numbers.
While Marvel fans know that Kevin Feige and his team shoot dozens upon dozens of scenes that don’t make it into the final cuts of MCU films — sometimes they are merely meant to throw fans off of actual plot points in trailers, in fact — it seems that one particular sequence in No Way Home could have been much longer.
In a recent interview, visual effects (VFX) supervisor Kelly Port shared that the bridge scenes featuring the return of Doctor Octopus/Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) originally clocked in at a quarter of an hour in length:
“Digital Domain was tasked with doing that sequence, which was a few hundred VFX shots. Also, the Digital Domain previs team did the previs for the whole movie, which was really cool, led by Matt McClurg. They just did such a great job. There’s so many cool iterations of that sequence that will never see the light of day. It was way longer. At one point in its longest iteration, it was 15 minutes long.”
Port went on to share how the team used both real items and digital technology to create the pivotal scene, in which Tom Holland’s MCU version of Spider-Man/Peter Parker unknowingly encounters the Marvel Multiverse for the very first time:
“But beyond that little piece of road section, Digital Domain built an entire, fully-CG digital environment around that that would include all the other surrounding bridges, the other side of the bridge that they’re on, all the city of Brooklyn and all the area around it, the river, and all the trees, the fall foliage. It just looked great.”
“We shot this outdoors, and so it was all about, how does this read on an Alexa camera if we were to actually shoot it otherwise, you just don’t know. You just guess. And just actually having that there, having physical cars there, too, will help inform our digital cars.”
Joining Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), the official description of Spider-Man: No Way Home reads:
For the first time in the cinematic history of Spider-Man, our friendly neighborhood hero is unmasked and no longer able to separate his normal life from the high-stakes of being a Super Hero. When he asks for help from Doctor Strange the stakes become even more dangerous, forcing him to discover what it truly means to be Spider-Man.
Tom Holland (Peter Parker/Spider-Man) and Zendaya (MJ) are joined by Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Stephen Strange), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Marisa Tomei (Aunt May), Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds), and Alfred Molina (Doctor Octopus) in the film.
Credit: Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios
