No one can accuse Spider-Man: No Way Home of lacking ambition. Tom Holland’s third solo Marvel Cinematic Universe outing, No Way Home, brought back old Spider-Man villains from across the multiverse, beloved Marvel Netflix characters were reintroduced, and Spider-Men of days gone by returned.
Despite being jam-packed though apparently there were plans to make the action movie even bigger. Spider-Man: No Way Home’s screenwriters, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, told TheWrap that some “big characters” were cut from the film because they didn’t want to overshadow their leading man, Holland.
“There were big characters [cut],” McKenna explained. “But almost too big, because it always became a balancing act of how do we tell not only a story with all these awesome villains that we know we want to bring into this movie, the classic ones, but also how do we make this still a Tom Holland/Peter Parker story so that he’s not completely overshadowed?”
“At the end of the day, it’s not going to be a great Spider-Man movie if you’re not telling an emotional Peter Parker story,” he continued. “We had these riches that we had to … This giant idea [with] all these great actors, but also we had to tell a story that felt like we were telling a personal story for our main character.”
During the same interview, the pair discussed an earlier story told by Tom Holland about Kraven the Hunter being the initial villain of No Way Home. The pair joked that Kraven has been discussed for every Spider-Man movie they’ve worked on before explaining that the great hunter was dropped as they developed the story.
“We were coming up with different storylines that were just right for the tag like that, so inevitably we were like, “Well, what if Kraven, what if other villains?” We were kicking around a lot of different ideas,” McKenna explained. “Then finally one day, I think for various reasons, there were reasons why we couldn’t do certain storylines that, I think it was Kevin [Feige] goes, ‘Remember that idea with all the villains that we were talking about for a tag? That Sinister Six idea? Why don’t we just do it in the movie, this movie be about that?'”
Don’t worry Kraven fans, the character’s finally getting a movie with Aaron Taylor Johnson playing the infamous villain.