We don’t talk enough about Spider-Man: No Way Home. It’s such a monumental accomplishment, and easily the best live-action Spider-Man movie (I’d rank the animated Spider-Verse movies ahead of it, but they are something special). When we do focus on Spider-Man: No Way Home, it’s to celebrate the fact that it brought the two previous Spidey actors – Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield – back to the role, and into Tom Holland’s world. But there’s another aspect of the production that Holland recently discussed, and it makes the film production sound like that much more or a miracle.
While appearing on the Rich Roll podcast recently, Tom Holland got candid about the filming of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and some of the challenges the crew faced. First of all, there’s the normal amount of secrecy that surrounds each and every upcoming Marvel movie. On top of that, the producers and director Jon Watts wanted to try and keep it a secret that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were coming back – which led to Garfield having to lie to the press for months at a time.
But what Holland brought up during the interview was the difficulty of filming during Covid. When Spider-Man: No Way Home opened in theaters, Sony President Tom Rothman was worried that audiences still weren’t comfortable gathering together en masse in an auditorium – something he told me exclusively for my Spider-Man book, With Great Power. The film went on to gross more than $1.9 billion worldwide. BUt Covid affected the film shoot. As Holland explained:
One of the unfortunate things about Spider-Man 3 was, we shot it in peak Covid times. So we shot everything in a studio. And you can feel it in the film, I think. Like when we’re walking through New York, they sent a crew to New York to shoot the streets with a motion camera jib. And then they brought that piece of kit back to Atlanta, and then they would mark on the floor, ‘There’s an extra here, there’s a dog here, there’s a sidewalk here.’ And then I would have to try and map out what I was going to do in a pre-existing shot.
There’s no getting around the feeling that a lot of Spider-Man: No Way Home feels cramped, and contained. It can feel green-screeny, and limited by the fact that they had to keep the action to controlled spaces on soundstages in Atlanta. We have pointed out over the years that some scenes – like the cemetery meeting between Peter (Tom Holland) and Happy (Jon Favreau) – blatantly look like they were shot indoors. And I always since when I see this shot of Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) checking his phone on the “streets” of New York City. It couldn’t look more fake.
Does it detract from the overall impact of the movie? No. It’s still awesome to see the three Spider-Man actors fighting all sorts of cool villains from the previous Spider-Man movies and franchises. The emotional beats still hammer home, because the cast is fantastic. But you can feel, as Holland says, the difference between something that has been filmed on a stage, and a scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming that actually filmed in Queens or New York City.
This was a necessity. All of Hollywood was wrestling with Covid restrictions and new safety protocols. So just the fact that they pulled this movie off at all is a miracle. We will always appreciate it for that reason, and we’ll look forward to Spider-Man 4, hopefully filming on the streets of Manhattan (as well as in the UK) sometime in 2025.
