Warning: This article contains  SPOILERS for Spider-Man: No Way Home

Zendaya has explained how MJ and Peter’s roles have reversed in the conclusion to Jon Watts’ “Homecoming” trilogy, Spider-Man: No Way Home. Zendaya made her MCU debut alongside Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, a film that saw her play Michelle, a sarcastic/guarded student who would rather mock her classmates than become a social butterfly. At the end of the film, it was revealed that Michelle Jones is the MJ to the MCU’s Peter Parker. After developing that iconic relationship in Spider-Man: Far From Home two years later, MJ returned in Spider-Man: No Way Home, the biggest film of the past year.

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In Far From Home’s credits scene, Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) implicated Spider-Man as a murderer and revealed his secret identity to the world. Picking up where that left off, No Way Home begins with Peter and MJ fleeing Times Square. The beginning of the film deals with how Peter, as a divisive figure, affects the lives of his family and friends. Ultimately, Peter asks Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) for help. Unfortunately, the pair end up cracking open the multiverse and bringing back former Spidey villains Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Electro (Jamie Foxx), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), and Lizard (Rhys Ifans). Thankfully, Peter remedies this situation and overcomes tragedy with the help of some familiar webslingers, his friend Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and, of course, MJ.

In an interview with Marvel.com, Zendaya spoke on how, in the first couple of Spider-Man movies, MJ is very much a loner. When Peter comes along, she becomes less and less so. Then, in No Way Home, MJ even becomes a much more positive and “confident” person, just like Peter. Read what Zendaya had to say about this role reversal below:

“Peter helps to melt MJ a little bit and break the shell that she’s had to build in order to protect herself from the world. She doesn’t have many people she feels that she can trust and rely on, and Peter has now become one of those people. And she doesn’t want to lose him … She doesn’t want to lose this person that really has allowed her to feel more and more like herself, and more and more confident in who she is, and loves her exactly for all the quirks and things that make her who she is. Because he’s going through so much, she now takes on his positivity that maybe he’s losing a little bit. He takes on a more negative nihilistic outlook.”

The character arc that Zendaya points out is clearly evident by the end of Spider-Man:No Way Home. While discussing college applications near the beginning of the film, MJ tells Peter, “If you expect disappointment, then you can never really be disappointed.” When she and her friends don’t get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Peter goes to Strange and multiversal madness ensues. In the movie’s climax, Peter realizes the only way to protect the multiverse is for Strange to erase “Peter Parker” from everyone’s memory, and then promises MJ and Ned he will find them after and remind them who he is. At the end of the film, Peter goes to the donut shop where MJ works and finds her and Ned have gotten into MIT. After revisiting MJ’s quote from earlier in the film, this time MJ chooses optimism, saying, “something feels different this time,” which factors into Peter’s decision to break his promise.

On top of making Zendaya’s MJ a more prominent and more nuanced character than in previous Spider-Man films, Spider-Man: No Way Home gives her a comic-accurate-esque name in Michelle Jones-Watson. It remains to be seen whether Zendaya’s MJ will seen again in the MCU, but recent reports suggest Disney/Marvel Studios and Sony are actively developing future films with Holland’s webslinger. And, like Superman and Lois or Batman and Alfred, Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson go hand-in-hand, and it would certainly be a shame to waste MJ’s character development by not bringing her back to the screen.

Source: Marvel.com

Key Release Dates
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  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)Release date: May 06, 2022
  • Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)Release date: Jul 08, 2022
  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever/Black Panther 2 (2022)Release date: Nov 11, 2022
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)Release date: Jul 28, 2023
  • The Marvels/Captain Marvel 2 (2023)Release date: Feb 17, 2023
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)Release date: May 05, 2023
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Josh Plainse
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Josh Plainse is a writer, movie, and television fanatic based out of Wisconsin. Josh works for Screen Rant covering the latest in entertainment while simultaneously pursuing the never-ending dream of becoming an established novelist, screenwriter, and/or decent human being. Josh would accredit characters such as Goku, Han Solo, Simba, and Maximus Decimus Meridius for instilling within him an affinity for storytelling. It is this incessant obsession which has propelled him to seek opportunities that inform, entertain, and inspire others.

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