Spider-Man: No Way Home - 13 Fascinating New Details The Writers Just Revealed

2. Originally, The Movie Was Set To Take Place AFTER Doctor Strange 2

Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness
Marvel Studios

A minor, yet possibly hugely important tidbit mentioned in Variety's article is the fact that McKenna and Sommers started writing No Way Home under the impression that it was set after Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness:

“We were actually working off of things that were happening in Doctor Strange 2, and trying to incorporate them into our script."

But then, the pandemic happened, forcing release dates to be shifted and movies to be pushed. Strange's sequel was shoved down the line, forcing the Spidey writers to change their script so that Strange knew basically nothing about the multiverse:

"When we started writing, [Strange] knows firsthand the dangers of screwing with these things. Then we changed it so he was a person who doesn’t know that much about the multiverse. But that makes it even more frightening, to start fooling around with these things, because it’s the fear of the unknown."

This is actually a really interesting detail, because what if certain remnants of that original, post-Doctor Strange 2 script survived into the finished version of No Way Home? Does Strange come out of his sequel unscathed and unchanged, like we see in No Way Home? Does Wanda die in Multiverse Of Madness, considering that she isn't mentioned in No Way Home? Are we reading too much into this? Probably.

Either way, it just goes to show how complicated it is running a cinematic universe - if one thing changes, everything else has to change around it.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!