#No Way Home VFX Team Discuss Trailer’s Lizard Punch

Spider-Man: No Way Home attempted to trick fans by omitting its returning stars from the trailer, but one scene made it clear something was missing.

When Marvel Studios and Sony released the first full trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home, fans immediately picked apart every frame of footage to find where the trailer had been manipulated in order to fool them into thinking that Tom Holland was the only Spider-Man in the movie. This led to several moments being called out as being doctored, including a blink and you miss it clip that appeared in the international trailer, showing Rhys Ifans’ Lizard being punched by an invisible assailant during the climactic fight scene. The visual effects team has now commented on the trailer error that almost immediately confirmed the presence of more than one Spider-Man in the film.

Over the last decade, fans have come to believe nothing that they see in trailers for upcoming MCU movies as in an attempt to keep their biggest secrets intact, Marvel Studios has been known to include alternative takes of some scenes, add in scenes that are specially shot to misdirect, or remove certain aspects of a scene to make sure that some surprises are not revealed until the film arrives in cinemas. When the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer arrived, it seemed that Marvel and Sony’s attempts to bamboozle fans wasn’t as flawless as it could have been and visual effects supervisor Chris Waegner mentioned the editing mistake while speaking on online VFX magazine Before and Afters.

“As filmmakers we are often asked to deliver WIPs and other various media to the marketing teams. We pretty much give them what they’re requesting but we don’t see the final assembly until it’s released mainstream. I know the internet went crazy and there were many rumors about it.”

Spider-Man: No Way Home’s Missing Spider-Men Didn’t Fool Marvel Fans

Based on the comments by Waegner, it seems likely that rather than Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire being removed from the footage for the trailer, the shots that were used were simply prints from before the pair were added into the scene. Either way, it wasn’t enough to fool eagle-eyed Marvel fans, and that was not the only indication that former stars of the franchise would be returning in the movie.

Months before a trailer arrived, some very authentic looking stills of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire in costume on what looked like a blue-screen scaffolding rig appeared on the internet, and while many tried to call out the images as fake, there were a lot of people who took this as the first sign that something unprecedented was about to happen the MCU’s latest outing for its webbed wonder. Additionally, when the trailer arrived another clip from the climatic fight scene appeared to feature a floating arm, which would turn out to be Andrew Garfield, who had been digitally removed from the shot of MJ falling from the scaffolding.

With numerous Marvel movies arriving this year, and the first of those, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, already having had a trailer released, it is time for a whole new round of guess what will and won’t feature in the final movie from the next batch of Phase 4 films.

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