Spider-Man director was pressured to vary Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s intros after studying a Reddit thread

Speaking to Collider, Jon shared how the preliminary plan was to introduce the older Peter Parkers throughout a vital emotional scene — proper after Aunt May’s demise. The second was imagined as a somber one, the place “Peter’s going to be unhappy as a result of Aunt May has simply died, and that the portals are going to open, and the 2 Spider-Men are going to step out.” He famous that “there had been rumors that Tobey and Andrew had been going to be within the film,” even whereas the staff was nonetheless filming and finalizing the script.

At the time, Jon had solely a tough imaginative and prescient for the setting of this team-up. “It’s most likely a rooftop someplace. It’s all kind of hazy. You’re nonetheless attempting to determine it out,” he stated. But that obscure imaginative and prescient shortly hit a roadblock when he stumbled upon fan theories and idea artwork on-line. “Then I used to be on Reddit, and I used to be taking a look at individuals who had already made fan artwork of, ‘This might be what it is going to be like when the 2 Spider-Men get revealed,’” he stated. “It was on a rooftop. It was unhappy, two Doctor Strange portals had been open and two Spider-Men are stepping out. I used to be like, ‘Well, we will not do this. If that is precisely what everybody thinks we will do, we completely cannot do this’,” he added.

That realisation led to a dramatic shift in how the reveal performed out onscreen. Instead of rising collectively on a rooftop, the alternate Spider-Men are introduced into the story via Ned Leeds, who inadvertently summons them utilizing Doctor Strange’s sling ring — inside his household residence.

“I used to be like, ‘What does nobody anticipate that we will do? What’s one thing that nobody’s going to see coming?’” Jon recalled. “I used to be like, ‘Probably having the 2 Spider-Men seem at Ned’s Filipino grandma’s home in Queens. I do not assume anybody was doing fan artwork of that on Reddit’,” he added.

Jon credited the inclusion of Ned’s grandmother, performed by Mary Rivera, because the sudden twist that gave the scene its allure. “It was the center of the pandemic, so we needed to discover a woman and fly her from Hawaii to Atlanta to shoot all of this,” he stated. Changing the setting, he added, allowed him to subvert fan expectations in essentially the most satisfying manner. “So, as quickly as you set her in that scene and alter the placement, now I really feel like I’ve double-crossed the viewers in one of the simplest ways, the place they’re seeing every little thing that they had been hoping that they’d see in a manner that they had been by no means anticipating they had been going to,” he concluded.