No Way Home’s Spider-Man vs Doc Ock Bridge Scene Was Originally Much Longer

The VFX supervisor for Spider-Man: No Way Home revealed that the Doc Ock freeway fight scene was originally much longer. No Way Home is the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the third film to feature Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. The film has been breaking box office records left and right, including being the only film in the pandemic era to reach $1 billion and preparing to knock Incredibles 2 out of the top 10 domestic grosses of all time by the end of the weekend.

The film is an incredibly ambitious crossover which sees Peter asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell that goes terribly wrong, bringing in characters from other Spider-Man universes including Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man trilogy, Marc Webb’s 2012 The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, and Sony’s Venom universe. The first inkling that Peter has of these consequences comes when he is visiting an MIT admissions official while she’s in traffic on the freeway. Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, who was the villain of 2004’s Spider-Man 2 starring Tobey Maguire, arrives to wreak havoc and take down Peter before realizing he’s an entirely different Peter from the one he knows.

The website befores and afters interviewed visual effects supervisor Kelly Port about what it took to bring the action sequences of Spider-Man: No Way Home to the screen. He broke down the scene, revealing that it contained “a few hundred VFX shots” and that there are many alternate versions of the scene “that will never see the light of day.” The longest version of the scene clocked in at “15 minutes long,” which was presumably cut down to preserve the pacing of a film that already ended up with a hefty runtime of 148 minutes. Read the full quote below:

Digital Domain was tasked with doing that sequence, which was a few hundred VFX shots…There’s so many cool iterations of that sequence that will never see the light of day. It was way longer. At one point in its longest iteration, it was 15 minutes long.

Making sure the freeway scene played properly was one of the key tasks of the VFX team on No Way Home, considering the fact that it’s the first introduction of the Spider-Man multiverse. It’s also massively important in setting up Doc Ock’s arc throughout the film. He is one of the key players in the film’s theme of criminal rehabilitation, as the doctor himself is not actively evil but rather being controlled by the mechanical tentacles that are grafted to his body.

Unfortunately for fans who want to gobble up every possible morsel of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Port seems insistent that these alternative scenes will never be released. However, it makes sense because these alternative cuts don’t function the same way as regular deleted scenes. Because they didn’t end up being used in the film, it’s unlikely that the effects ever became polished enough to be worth sharing in the first place.

Source: befores and afters

About The Author