Spider-Man: No Way Home casting rumors are out of hand

People obsessing over an upcoming Marvel movie isn’t particularly novel — by the time you finish reading this, there will likely be a dozen new YouTube uploads analyzing the brand of coffee that appears in a trailer for a single frame — but the hype over Spider-Man, There’s No Way HomeIt seems more intense. This is especially evident when Spider-Men discuss it.

Star Tom Holland spoke to Total Film earlier this week and stressed that the film would be dark.

“What people will be really surprised about is that it’s not fun, this film,” Holland said. “It’s dark and it’s sad, and it’s going to be really affecting.”

This is a curious way to sell a Spider-Man film, especially since Holland’s version of the character has expressly been a dose of much-needed levity in the middle of a Marvel Cinematic Universe, that, despite constant wisecracks, is often deadly serious. But there’s a certain amount of sense to it: You can’t go home!It is being presented as the conclusion of a trilogy.

Meanwhile, a Gizmodo blog post went viral for surfacing a quote from former Spider-Man Andrew Garfield: “Money Is the Thing That Has Corrupted All of Us and Led to the Terrible Ecological Collapse That We Are All About to Die Under,” read the headline. It was an excerpt from a profile in the Guardian, in which Garfield mostly talks about his career in the abstract — he’s about to star in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tick, Tick….Boom on Netflix — but he does note that his experience as Spider-Man broke him a little. (He also says that he’s kidding about the ecological collapse thing, kind of.)

The third cinematic Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire, isn’t really giving interviews these days but there are a lotMany people are trying to convince the world that he’s real.

Although this is extreme, it’s not impossible. You can’t go home! This is all because the MCU’s latest gimmick, the multiverse, is a well-known science fiction trope. It asserts that there are infinite parallel realities and each of them can be different in many ways. In practice, this lets Marvel Studios potentially tell standalone stories removed from its decade-long ongoing narrative, waving away implications one movie or show might have on another by establishing that it’s in an alternate universe. This hasn’t happened yet, but it could — and since the 2018 animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-VerseThe show also included a range of Spider-People, from various universes. You can’t go home! trailer including a villain from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films) fans feel like anything is possible.

Photo: Sony Pictures Animation

While the current Spider-Man state is rather bizarre, it is a hilarious mirror of the character that everyone keeps talking about, but is actually nothing. Peter Parker transformed from a child who idolized superheroes into a man with multiple million-dollar AI killersuits and access to high-tech superweapons in just two films. Throughout this trilogy, Parker has swiftly transformed from an avatar of aspirational fandom (perhaps you are down on your luck but if you are responsible and never ever give up you can be extraordinary) — to fandom as a corporate exercise (come see all your toys in one movie).

In all of this, Andrew Garfield has perhaps become the most valuable voice in the whole scenario, repeatedly articulating the conflict between what a character means to adoring fans (which he memorably displayed at a convention not long after he was cast in 2011) and what they mean to the corporations that own them — and how that ultimately suffocates art and meaning.

It’s different from what we are used to You can’t go home!The hype will make you believe anything. isn’t Possible. Contracts and lawyers are used to govern big franchise films. Corporate executives also have brands to protect the real human beings, who aren’t just corporate puppets that can put on suits (or have their faces digitally altered into one). What happens in You can’t go home!, even if it’s great — and it might very well be — will be the result of careful negotiation between dozens of interested parties, each more tied to each other than usual thanks to the uniquely interconnected nature of the cinematic universe. And as those interested parties expand in power and profitability, the more risk-averse — and therefore, less human — they are prone to become.

The multiverse, in other words, isn’t as big as you might think. It may not be large enough to allow Peter Parker to lose himself in it.