SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME Director Jon Watts Says Internet Theories Forced a Rewrite

It turns out Spider-Man: No Way Home nearly introduced Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in exactly the way Reddit guessed it would, and that… was the problem.

Director Jon Watts recently shared at the Mediterrane Film Festival that a fan's eerily accurate piece of Reddit fan art forced the creative team to rethink how the returning Spider-Men would enter the story. It wasn’t leaks or set photos that threw them, it was pure fan intuition.Watts said:

“We were writing the script, and we were working on where we wanted to reveal the guys, and it always seemed like 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. It’s probably a rooftop somewhere. It’s all sort of hazy.”

But then Reddit got too close for comfort. Watts continued:

“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.’ 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.’”

So they pivoted. Instead of unveiling Tobey and Andrew during a somber rooftop scene, the movie introduced them through Ned’s accidental use of a sling ring, turning the moment into something more playful and unexpected, while still keeping the emotional punch for later.

Interestingly, that original rooftop idea didn’t go to waste. It was retooled for a different part of the film when the three Spider-Men finally meet face to face, perched above a grief-stricken Tom Holland. It delivered that same sense of guidance and legacy, just not in the way fans thought it would.

Next up is Spider-Man: Brand New Day featuring Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Sadie Sink, and Jon Bernthal.