Having Peter Parker as a nephew is pretty much a death sentence, and while we didn’t have to sit through a third Uncle Ben death during Tom Holland’s MCU debut, Aunt May unfortunately ended up meeting her maker during Spider-Man: No Way Home. In emotional scenes, May died in Parker’s arms in the middle of a ravaged building. She was killed by the Green Goblin after he hijacked Parker’s plan to cure the various Spider-Man villains ripped from other universes.
The pandemic led to a lot of delays and rewrites for action movies like No From Home, and in an interview with Gold Derby, screenwriter Chris McKenna revealed that the death of Aunt May was originally meant to go down a lot differently before Covid-19 intervened.
“It was tricky [to write]. It was also tricky production-wise because we had different ideas for where the scene could take place, but because of Covid [it had to change],” he said. “We had one idea that maybe it was going to be inside an ambulance, and we had a whole version that was constructed around that, but that was not practical for shooting during Covid.”
While Aunt May was always meant to die, McKenna told Gold Derby that it was originally meant to be in the back of an ambulance.
“That’s the kind of thing that happens,” he added. “So then we had to move the scene, physically, to another place while trying to keep all the other elements working. We had to make adjustments, and that’s the kind of thing that happens in production. So it was [tricky], but I’m glad that it turned out the way it did, and that it affected people the way we wanted — that it resonated — because it’s so important to Peter’s story and to his journey.”
Spider-Man: No Way Home is available to watch at theatres. It is also now available to pre-order on streaming service Amazon Prime Video. Pre-orders of the DVD or Blu-ray for the adventure movie are also available.