The Spider-Man: No Way Home ending left some lingering questions in terms of the overall world of the MCU. Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, co-writers on the action movie, have an explanation, but the Marvel powers that be forbid them for divulging just yet. Warning: spoilers ahead!
During a livestream at IGN FanFest, a fan asked Sommers and McKenna about the erasure of Peter Parker from everyone’s memory. Does this include all the written publicity around the character? How does that work? Spider-Man was introduced to the franchise via someone capturing him on a phone; there’s a lot of footage and other publicity out there concerning him.
Shrewd interviewees, Sommers and McKenna say they could explain, but Marvel has forbidden them from doing so. “We can’t divulge much, but just know we talked about it a lot and there were conversations about it,” McKEnna says. “And I will say answering those questions by the end of the movie, felt like it would be almost too much to have to explain that, in this movie. So I would hope that it’s one of those details that I feel like would’ve been a bridge too far for us to have to explain in this movie. But we have thoughts and answers.”
Sommers elaborated. “We deliberated a lot. Is it going to be like a Back to the Future kind of thing? Or are people going to be disappearing from photos? Are physical objects going to be disappearing? All these things,” he says. “And like Chris said, ultimately, we decided that it would take so much time and real estate in the movie to explain all of that. It would just detract from the emotion of it.”
Getting stuck in the weeds of something like collective memory erasure is something that can detract from the storytelling. You’ll never answer every single potential hypothetical, so sometimes it’s better to just go with the moment. Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s final scenes work on an emotional level, and that’s what matters, at least for now.
We have good opportunity to see the impact on the wider universe when Doctor Strange 2 comes out in May. The trailer has teased our good Doctor having to clean up quite the messy Multiverse due to his spells in No Way Home. We mightn’t get an explanation, but we’ll see the ramifications.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness comes to theatres May 6. For more Marvel madness, check out our guide to Phase 4.