Spider-Man: No Way Home makes The Amazing Spider-Man 2 into an important tale for Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker. No Way Home's immense box office success has been one of the major topics of discussion since its release, with the movie being the first of the pandemic to surpass $1 billion at the worldwide box office, but that topic has also been far from the only one. Equally central to the very positive reception of No Way Home has been the Spider-Man trio it brought together.
Spider-Man: No Way Home opened the doorway of Marvel's Multiverse to bring past Spideys Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield into the MCU, aiding Tom Holland's local Web-Slinger in sending the villains who also made it through back to their universes. While all three Spider-Men won the hearts of audiences with their performances and chemistry together, Andrew Garfield's Spidey, or "Peter #3" as he is dubbed in the film, made an especially memorable return.
Andrew Garfield's appearance in No Way Home came eight years after The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which despite being intended as a launching pad for greater plans by Sony, ended up marking an anti-climactic end to Garfield's Spider-Man career. Or, so it seemed until Spider-Man: No Way Home brought both Garfield's Spider-Man and Jamie Foxx's Max Dillon a.k.a. Electro back in a manner that showed great respect toward The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Rather than overlooking the events of the film, Spider-Man: No Way Home goes to great lengths to stress The Amazing Spider-Man 2's importance in the overall picture of the journey of Garfield's Peter #3.
Amazing Spider-Man 2 Was The Franchise's Lowest Point
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was envisioned by Sony as being essentially their Iron Man in kickstarting a Spidey-centric shared universe. Sony's big plans included the introduction of Black Cat, the potential return of Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and most famously, Sony's big goal of a Sinister Six movie, all of it intended to work in tandem with The Amazing Spider-Man series as its base. Those grandiose plans ultimately came to a halt with the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in May 2014 and the movie's dip in audience enthusiasm from its predecessor.
While The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was by no means a box office flop with its $709 million total worldwide gross, it still marked a clear decline in the box office heights long associated with the Web-Head. Furthermore, The Amazing Spider-Man 2's general reception was very mixed, with many detractors complaining the film was overly tooled to being a vehicle for Sony's Spider-Man Cinematic Universe plans. By the summer of 2015, Tom Holland had become the MCU's Spider-Man as part of Sony's deal with Marvel with Sony's prior plans discarded (though Holland's origin was truly in No Way Home). Even after all of that, Garfield's Spidey return in No Way Home came in a way that surprisingly paid tribute to the Spider-Man movie that had appeared to many as a franchise-ender.
No Way Home Embraces The Amazing Spider-Man 2 In Peter #3's Story
Far from distancing itself from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man: No Way Home regards it as a pillar to the arc of Garfield's Peter #3 that cannot be ignored. By himself, Jamie Foxx's Electro evidences that, being heavily derided in the reception to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 while returning in No Way Home in a way that fully acknowledges his grudge against Peter #3, complete with the two making peace as Peter #3 assures the villain that "You were never a nobody, Max." While No Way Home fully embraces Foxx's Electro, even more emphasized is Peter #3's guilt over his failure to save MJ, treated as a loss that he's never truly healed from, and which he explains led him to "stop pulling my punches" and become "bitter".
Peter #3 successfully catching MJ (Zendaya) from her fall from the Statue of Liberty was a heroic redemption that audiences applauded, but it is even more important for what it represents as a third chapter in Peter #3's story. Spider-Man: No Way Home could have easily dropped Peter #3 into the story with little to no backstory offered of his life since his last movie - with the MCU installment not having gone much into that with Maguire's Peter #2 - but the film instead makes the conscious choice to build on how The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has shaped him. In doing so, Spider-Man: No Way Home is making its perspective known that no aspect of Maguire, Garfield, and Holland's Spider-Man stories can be dismissed without disregarding the totality of who they are as Spider-Man. In No Way Home's eyes, The Amazing Spider-Man 2's story of heroism and grief is as pertinent to Peter #3's arc as the day a spider subject to OsCorp experimentation turned his world upside with a bite.
Why Amazing Spider-Man 2 Is Important To Peter Parker's Future
With Spider-Man: No Way Home giving as much emphasis as it does to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the latter has undergone a retcon of a different sort. No longer is it once discarded franchise builder whose reach exceeded its grasp, but the firmly embedded chapter two in the superheroic life of Peter #3. That also means that Andrew Garfield's potential future in The Amazing Spider-Man 3, which his role in No Way Home led to calls for, has The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to look to as a building block just as much as Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Even the changes that the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home causes to the timeline in Peter #3's universe - that have occurred due to The Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro's Multiverse-facilitated survival in No Way Home - don't undercut this, because the retcon they represent is one that actively flows out of everything that happened in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man: No Way Home does not regard bringing Peter #3 and Electro into the MCU as a second chance to just make a better Spider-Man movie with them, but a second chance for the regret and scars of their pasts to no longer haunt them, with the two even becoming the friends Peter #3 always saw they could be. The Amazing Spider-Man 3 becoming a possibility because of No Way Home is a direct result of the importance the MCU Multiverse film sees in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Without it, Peter #3's return would have lost the heart of what made that return the emotional comeback that it was, a fact that No Way Home recognizes clear as day.
It was once rare to see a rebooted version of a big-screen superhero get a chance at a comeback, but modern comic book movies using the Multiverse as their new frontier has made that an increasingly popular trend. No Way Home did exactly that with Garfield's return and adoption of his Peter #3 title, but it goes far beyond just doing that. Spider-Man: No Way Home is very much of the opinion that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is completely fundamental to the essence of Andrew Garfield's once more beloved Spider-Man, and does everything in its power to strongly convey that message.
