EXCLUSIVE: Spider-Man: No Way Home Book Reveals the Origin of the 3 Peters Crossover

The upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home: The Official Movie Special Book adds context to the three Peter Parkers crossover.

CBR can exclusively reveal an excerpt of an interview with director Jon Watts from The Official Movie Book detailing the inspiration behind bringing back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to reprise their roles from previous incarnations of Spider-Man. Watts also reveals how full-circle his directing the Tom Holland Spider-Man films is after watching Sam Raimi’s films in the early 2000s.

Jon Watts Talks His Love of Spider-Man

How did you feel when you saw Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie back in 2002?

I loved Sam Raimi before Spider-Man. Evil Dead and Evil Dead II were such huge influences. As a young filmmaker, you’re seeing someone do something that is so entertaining and so full of life and comedy and energy and blood. There was something that always felt really approachable about his films where it’s like, “I could try something like that.”

When did the idea to bring back the earlier incarnations of Spider-Man first arise?

I don’t remember where the idea started. But just talking through it, it was like, “That would be crazy. That’s impossible. How do we do it?” To me, actually, even before it became any sort of multi-versal crossover thing, it was the idea of telling a story that wasn’t about being competitive. The idea that it’s not about which one’s the best…The idea that there was maybe some other way of thinking about that. That in a way they are all the same thing, and they could all come together and help each other, trying to figure out what that story might be. That, to me, felt like it was part of the DNA of the story that we were already trying to tell. That gave me an entry point for how to actually get them together so that it was a story element and an emotional thing and not just a gimmick or a series of cameos.

How did you approach incorporating their stories into the wider story of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man?

What’s nice about making a movie with three Spider-Men is that you can just ask the Spider-Men what they would do. “What would you be thinking? How would you carry this through?” So a lot of it was collaborative in that way. We just sort of got out folding chairs, and it would be me and Tom and Andrew and Tobey and Z and Jacob, sitting in a circle talking through the story and trying to discover it together and find the nuance. It wasn’t like you sit down at your computer, print out the page, and say, “This is what you’re gonna say.” It meant so much to everyone there that I just wanted to really discover it with them. It became this like really cool –surreal, is the word I keep coming back to –collaborative process.

Can you talk a little about how you approached the villains?

To me, it was just thinking about what would be fun to see –visual combinations that you never thought you would see. And just at the heart of it, who are these guys? Who are these actors? How great would it be to see Alfred Molina again and Willem Dafoe? And you get to see Willem Dafoe without the mask — really get to see him be who he is. And having Jamie get to come in.

There are so many great actors that have been in these movies. To be able to bring them all together and to find a way to finish their storylines in a different way…They’re all sort of the victims of accidents. They’re the victims of technological mistakes, some hubristic, some purely accident. Jamie Foxx just falls into a tank of electric eels. It’s just an accident. But to use that as an entry point to tell a story about the idea of second chances…It’s like you sort of stumble around with the pieces that you pull together until you find a way to put it together into a story that makes sense.

Spider-Man: No Way Home: The Official Movie Special Book Details

Besides Watts, the Spider-Man: No Way Home book also includes interviews with Holland, Maguire, Garfield, Zendaya and Benedict Cumberbatch. Additional behind-the-scenes interviews with the crew of No Way Home reveal the makings of the movie, such as its stunts, costumes and visual effects.

Spider-Man: No Way Home: The Official Movie Special Book is available for presale at Amazon now and will be released on Feb. 28