Why MCU's Spider-Man 4 Has To Be Different After No Way Home

Tom Holland's Peter Parker must have a very different MCU journey after Spider-Man: No Way Home in Spider-Man 4. To say that expectations are high for the third installment in the MCU's Spider-Man trilogy would be an understatement. The arrival of multiple multiversal villains and Peter Parker's potential team-up with other iterations of Spider-Man make No Way Home one of the most ambitious superhero movies ever. So, how could a sequel follow such a huge event?

Since his introduction in Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man has undeniably remained under the shadow of the Avengers, and more specifically, Iron Man. Given Peter Parker's age and lack of experience, it makes sense that the teenager's role models have been MCU veterans like Tony Stark and Doctor Strange instead of Uncle Ben. But Peter has also been growing more mature with every victory and every defeat, which have taught him that being a superhero is more than fame and thrills. However, he's still committing rookie mistakes due to his naive personality, as evidenced by his blind trust in Mysterio during Spider-Man: Far From Home and his interruption of Doctor Strange's spell in the trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home.

With Tony Stark out of the picture and the original Avengers disbanded after the events of Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man will have to go through a more drastic transformation. Spider-Man: No Way Home is the perfect moment to signal the end of an era for the wall-crawler. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tom Holland expressed that despite the possibility of more sequels coming in the future, Spider-Man: No Way Home will be the end of a cycle, and that the characters in a future installment would be "very different". Read Holland's full comments below:

"We were all treating [No Way Home] as the end of a franchise, let's say," he adds. "I think if we were lucky enough to dive into these characters again, you'd be seeing a very different version. It would no longer be the Homecoming trilogy. We would give it some time and try to build something different and tonally change the films. Whether that happens or not, I don't know. But we were definitely treating [No Way Home] like it was coming to an end, and it felt like it."

Peter Parker and Miles Morales in Spider-Man No Way Home

Unlike the previous two Spider-Man franchises, the Homecoming series of films have only explored the beginning of Peter Parker's journey as a superhero. It wouldn't be fair for Tom Holland's Spider-Man to end his cinematic presence with a single trilogy that only showed his first steps into this universe, much less after proving his worth in a multiversal battle against some of Marvel's most powerful villains. Regardless of which of the two companies would helm the next movies, Disney and Sony could work together to produce a new trilogy that features Peter Parker's Spider-Man in his prime, more independent and confident in his battle against a new wave of classic Spidey supervillains. This also gives both companies to develop the complex relationships between Spider-Man and other established characters like Venom, Morbius, Scorpion, Vulture, and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter.

With so many characters and stories expanding Sony and Disney's shared universes and with so much source material to adapt, Tom Holland could keep starring in multiple Spider-Man movies until Peter Parker becomes a superhero veteran worthy of retirement, at which point he could become a mentor to Miles Morales, just like Iron Man was a mentor to him. After all, Tony Stark influenced the entire Infinity Saga (and his impact on the MCU still continues well into Phase 4), and Spider-Man could follow suit. While Spider-Man: No Way Home seems to be the breathtaking end of Peter Parker's MCU trilogy, it might as well be just a taste of bigger things to come.

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