As the first teaser for Spider-Man: No Way Home opens, we finally pick back up from where Spider-Man: Far From Home ended. J.K. Simmons’s reprisal of J.J. Jameson has revealed Spider-Man’s secret identity to the world. It seems like it shouldn’t be that huge of a deal, given that pretty much every Avenger has been known by name since the original Iron Man, and Hulk was taking fan selfies alongside an Ant-Man no one gave a shit about in Endgame. But here it’s apparently a crisis of celebrity and the dubious criminality of whether Peter Parker murdered Mysterio. (Like with the sudden crisis of celebrity, we’re also suddenly caring about whether these huge superhero fights constitute murder when the bad guy dies.)
Instead of looking to a lawyer and a security team, Parker looks to some Doctor Strange novelty light strands and decides to get the man himself to magic away his doxxing. So he heads over to Strange’s place, where he finds out the landlord seems to have turned off the gas, but it’s fine because Strange used his rent money to instead buy a custom puffy-coat in his exact style. Strange casts a spell to make everyone forget that Parker is Spider-Man, but Parker’s yammering mucks it up, and thusly, we get the much-touted multiverse.
“The multiverse is a concept about which we know frighteningly little,” Strange says, as if we didn’t just suffer through an entire declining series about this shit. But now, like with the first Doctor Strange movie, it gets all pseudo-Inceptiony with it, buildings on city streets bending as the multiverse opens.
Yet in this teaser, it’s still not revealed to be all that much of a multiverse.
For all the news and rumors of the returns of Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, for some reason Jamie Foxx, and more, all this preview gives us is the suggestion of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and a peek at the already-confirmed return of Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus. Granted, Molina’s Doc Ock is one of if not the best comic book villain ever on screens, but for such a sprawling concept, it wouldn’t be bad to see some more of it. Yeah, yeah, “ugh, spoilers,” but if the full trailer doesn’t end on Maguire’s Spider-Man, there is going to be rioting in the Inception-style collapsing streets.
This thing comes out December 17, so we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, don’t forget to buy the PS5 controllers weirdly advertised at the end of the trailer!
