The MCU Could Still Have Its Own Green Goblin After No Way Home

This article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The MCU could still introduce its own version of Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, after Spider-Man: No Way Home. Tom Holland's first trilogy as Spider-Man has come to a triumphant close, in a multiversal adventure that serves as a love-letter to the entire Spider-Man franchise. An out-of-control magic spell from Doctor Strange risked the collapse of the multiverse, with Spider-Man villains from other universes making the jump into the MCU — swiftly followed by other iterations of Spider-Man himself, with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield reprising their roles.

Willem Dafoe's return as Norman Osborn has won universal acclaim. His Green Goblin was at the height of his madness, with two personalities vying for supremacy. Lost and confused by the experience of living in a world without OsCorp, one where someone else was living in his house, Osborn wound up living on the streets. He initially became an ally of Spider-Man, working with him in an attempt to cure the various villains who had been trapped in the MCU. But, however well-meaning the Osborn persona may have been, the Goblin was still there — and soon he had reverted to villainy, with Aunt May a casualty of his bloodlust. Green Goblin came close to breaking Spider-Man, with Holland's wall-crawler almost committing murder. The whole portrayal was a tremendous one, with Dafoe stealing every scene he appeared in, and it ended with Green Goblin cured and send back to his own timeline. On the face of it, it looks as though this is the last time the MCU's Spider-Man will face a Green Goblin — especially given the revelation OsCorp doesn't exist in the MCU.

Sony has already provided a way out of this, though. Ahead of the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the studio published a promotional issue of the Daily Bugle that hinted at some plot points. One rumor clearly pertained to the Green Goblin, and suggested in the MCU, Norman Osborn is in fact a failed CEO. "Which former CEO showed up uninvited to the party, green with envy? Onlookers say he 'flew' off the handle when he wasn't on the list," it reports — which fits rather well with Osborn's rants in the film itself. Viewers shouldn't write out an MCU Green Goblin just yet.

This is, of course, a smart way for Marvel and Sony to have their cake and eat it. They get to use Norman Osborn's Green Goblin without necessarily implying anything about the status of the MCU's version — but there's a catch. The fake Daily Bugle article clearly hints Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn was recognized by some of the people at the event he crashed, because otherwise he wouldn't have been pegged as a "former CEO." Multiversal variants sometimes do correspond visually — as the recent trailer for Doctor Strange 2 proves — so presumably the MCU's is still played by Willem Dafoe.

All this raises the question of just how the MCU could use Green Goblin. The best way would be to play on Spider-Man's foreknowledge, his awareness Norman Osborn could potentially become the Green Goblin. This would essentially invert the story from the comics, that has already played out twice on the big screen; it would mean Spider-Man knew what he could be in for as soon as he heard the name Osborn, and he'd naturally do his best to avert it. It's even easy to imagine a scenario where Peter became friends with a fellow college student named "Harry," and only realized he was Norman's son Harry Osborn when he heard his friend's surname. Such an arc would be fresh and original, making this a new story worth telling after Spider-Man: No Way Home.

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