Five of the biggest unanswered questions from Spider-Man: No Way Home

Rory Cashin

Spoilers for the movie with the third-highest opening weekend at the box office in the history of cinema.

In case you missed it, Spider-Man: No Way Home is a massive hit.

Opening to the tune of a $600 million at the global box office, it is the third biggest opening weekend ever, behind only Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War (so… well done there, Marvel).

Chances are you’ve watched the movie already (particularly if you’ve seen that headline and clicked in anyways), but this is your one and only SPOILER warning.

Still here? Right, on with the questions we’ve all been left asking by the time the end credits have stopped rolling…

ONE: So… does Peter Parker just not exist anymore?

On the one hand, this cleverly hits the reset button for both Peter Parker and Spider-Man, meaning he can potentially work on getting both “friendly” and “neighbourhood” into his official title, and less worried about the seemingly weekly arrival of the apocalypse.

However, with Doctor Strange’s successful spell causing everyone to forget Peter Parker, does that mean all evidence of him ever having existed also disappears? As in birth certificates, bank accounts, his clothes in the now-dead Aunt May’s (Marisa Tomei) apartment…? Couldn’t Strange have just pulled off the original spell, and have everyone forget that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, instead of forgetting Parker altogether?

And by deleting Parker’s entire history, did that also apply to the alternate Spidey’s who arrive throughout No Way Home? Will Maguire and Garfield return to their respective timelines only to discover they’ve had their slates wiped clean, too?

We realise this first question has already resulted in five questions, but that is what happens when your movie involves both time travel AND inter-dimensional travel.

TWO: Why is Electro the only one to get a glow-up?

All of the villains are pulled into Holland’s timeline pretty much as they were in their own movies, thanks to some spot-on digital de-ageing. Over the course of the movie, Norman Osborn does the smart thing and smashes that horrendous OG (Original Goblin) mask, because that looked whack in 2002 and has not aged for the better.

Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) and The Lizard (Rhys Ifans) all appear the same as they did when we last saw them in Maguire and Garfield’s timelines, but when Electro (Jamie Foxx) zaps in, he looks markedly better than the Tobius “I just blue myself” Funke impersonator he appeared to be in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Why? No idea. We’re guessing it was a purely aesthetic decision, but a single line of dialogue explaining it wouldn’t have hurt.

THREE: Are all of the villains still going back to die?

We know that Holland’s Parker’s plan is to, essentially, rehabilitate all of these villains in his timeline, instead of Strange’s plan, which is to send them back to their own timeline, and to their certain imminent deaths.

(Well, mostly, as Sandman doesn’t die. And neither does The Lizard.) (Also, if the initial spell was to bring in only those who knew that Peter Parker equals Spider-Man, it doesn’t explain why Electro was dragged into it, as he didn’t know that information.) (That’s enough brackets for now.)

But we see that Garfield and Maguire’s Parkers are dragged through from a completely different point in time to the villains, and we’re assuming they’re returned to that point, too. So the “reformed” bad guys are sent back to their own timeline, moments before they’re killed in the presence of younger, uninformed versions of Spider-Mans/Spider-Men.

That’s not ideal, really.

FOUR: Does Venom know about Peter Parker?

During the end credits of Venom: Let Their Be Carnage, we see that Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) has been warped from his own universe into a parallel one, and on the TV we see a just-outed Peter Parker (Tom Holland), who Venom takes an immediate liking to.

During the end credits of No Way Home, we see Brock is sitting in a bar, chatting about all of the heroes and villains in this version of reality, before being warped away, presumably back to his own universe, but not before leaving just a little slimy sliver of the symbiote behind.

Venom claims they doesn’t know what is happening when they arrives in this version of the MCU, and neither they nor Brock know who Peter Parker is, so why were they dragged through at all? We’re guessing it was just so they could leave a bit of Venom in the mainline MCU to play with going forward, but that had to have been a cleaner/more interesting way to do it than that.

FIVE: Does What If…? bear more weight in the MCU than we previously thought?

Pretty much every live-action MCU show on Disney+ has proven to be very important in the overall scheme of the MCU, including the current run of Hawkeye, which has brought back Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) right around the same time No Way Home brought back Daredevil (Charlie Cox).

However, it felt like the animated show What If…? was less important in the overall scheme of things… at least until the second post-credits sequence of No Way Home, which was actually a teaser trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

The next MCU movie is currently set to arrive in cinemas in May 2022, directed by Sam Raimi (who helmed the original Spider-Man trilogy), and on top of bringing back a post-WandaVision Scarlett Witch, it also re-introduces the Doctor Strange Supreme: the evil version of himself that went a bit mad with grief following the death of Dr. Palmer (Rachel McAdams) in the What If…? series.

Whether it is that exact character, or just another version of it, we’ll have to wait a few more months to find out.

BONUS: How does Morbius know about Venom AND The Vulture AND Oscorp?

At 2.50 in the trailer below, we hear Morbius (Jared Leto) say “I am Venom.”

But in that same trailer, at 2.10, we see Morbius walking past a poster of Spider-Man with the word “Murderer” written over it, which is a different universe to the Venom universe.

At 2.12, we see The Vulture (Michael Keaton), saying he and Morbius should stay in touch… but Vulture knew who Peter Parker was, so why wasn’t he involved in the action of No Way Home?

Plus, at 1.40, we see a skyscraper with an OSCORP logo on it, which is in the same font as (but on a different building to) The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But that would be a different reality again to both Venom AND Holland’s Parker…

Hopefully at least some of these questions can be answered when Morbius arrives in Irish cinemas in January 2022.