Be warned. MAJOR SPOILERS forSpider-Man: No Way Homelie ahead.
If you’re still here, that means that you have either seen theMarvelepic that isSpider-Man: No Way Home, or you don’t care about things being spoiled. To the latter group, we suggest you rethink your position and leave now, catch up with everyone else by watching the movie, and then come back.
With that out of the way,Spider-Man: No Way Home’sVFX Supervisor Kelly Port has now revealed several wonderful details regarding the movie’s final battle, which sees Tom Holland’s web-slinger team-up with bothAndrew Garfieldand Tobey Maguire’s iterations of the Marvel superhero. While the scene could have resulted in something visually quite confusing, with audiences losing sight of whichSpider-Manvariant they were following, Port reveals that the VFX team when to great pains to ensure this was never the case.
“In the end battle, there’s a lot of passing and things like that. Editorially, we did everything we could to just verify that it was as clear as possible, whether through handovers, meaning you saw more than one Spidey in a frame handing something off and tossing something to somebody else, so that you know who’s who for the most part, in addition to what the different suits look like.”
Discussing the sequence withbefore and afters, Port reveals that, not only did the artists use framing for clarity, they also strived to recreate the individual personalities and mannerisms for each of the three Spider-Men. This, combined with certain, familiar musical cues, allows the audience to easily differentiate between the Spider-Man versions while the action flows.
“Stylistically, they each have their own kind of iconic poses. This is especially the case where after the sandstorm and regrouping, you get that amazing theme music where even the scores are intertwined. You get some of the Danny Elfman stuff in there, and it’s really, really cool, because each have their own themes. When all three jumping onto the top of the statue head, backlit by the moon, you get those iconic poses as well in the air. We just took great pains to even get their running styles and the gaits and their iconic poses in the air and their swinging styles.”
So detailed was their approach that the VFX team even made slight, subtle changes to Maguire and Garfield’s suits to portray the passage of time. “The fact that Tobey and Andrew came from a slightly later timeline, they’re older, so time has passed,” Port explained, “and they’ve lived their lives and probably have changed their suits or augmented them a little bit.”
The hard work as clearly paid off, resulting in one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most exciting, most stunning, and most rewarding finales, and one whichSpider-Manfans will be thinking about for years to come.Spider-Man: No Way Homeis out now,and has been declared not only the highest-grossing movie of 2021, but also the 12th highest-grossing movie of all time.
