Spider-Man: No Way HomeSave

Pick up the second the credits of Far From Home (2019) rolled to black. Times Square, mid-afternoon, the giant Daily Bugle billboard, J. Jonah Jameson — J.K. Simmons reprising the role he played in Sam Raimi's trilogy twenty years earlier — screaming Mysterio's last broadcast into the public square. "Spider-Man's name is PETER PARKER." A doctored video shows Peter ordering the drone strike that killed Mysterio in London. Peter and MJ are on a subway grate. They look up. They see the screen. They see Peter's photo blown up sixty feet wide. The next ninety seconds are the worst day of his life — a Manhattan crowd swarms him, NYPD escorts pull him out, MJ swings on his back as Spider-Man as a paparazzi mob tries to mob them. He gets her to Happy Hogan's apartment and slams the door.

The Department of Damage Control — Matt Murdock's first MCU appearance, briefly, sitting at a table in a hoodie acting as legal counsel — drags Peter, MJ, Ned Leeds, May Parker, and Happy Hogan in for federal interrogations. Murdock gets the charges dropped because the prosecution can't even establish a crime, but the social damage is permanent. May loses her FEAST housing volunteer position. Happy's home is searched. Ned and MJ become tabloid fodder by association. Then the rejection emails arrive: MIT, MJ's first choice, Peter's only feasible school. Rejected. So is MJ. So is Ned. Every Ivy says the same. The Spider-Man association is now poison and nobody on the planet doesn't know who they hang out with.

Peter walks two miles in the rain to 177A Bleecker Street and rings the Sanctum Sanctorum doorbell. Wong answers, in robes, holding a snow shovel, on his way to a wedding in the Himalayas. He waves Peter at Stephen Strange in the basement, where the wizard is icing over an entire room because the Sanctum's heating system is broken. Peter pitches his idea: cast a spell that makes everyone forget he's Spider-Man. Strange, against Wong's now-departed advice, agrees because he's bored and the kid is sweet. He begins the spell. Then Peter starts revising it mid-cast. "Wait, can MJ still know? Wait, can Ned know? Can May know? Can Happy know?" Strange is up to his elbows in a swirling rune lattice and he keeps slapping each amendment in by hand. The rune lattice cracks. The whole spell shatters. Strange shoves the broken spell into a small wooden box called the Macchina di Kadavus and tells Peter to get out.

Peter, sheepish, leaves. He calls MIT's admissions officer from the steps. Bargains. Maybe the officer hasn't even gotten to MJ's file yet. He's on the phone walking down a highway shoulder when a car horn blares behind him and he turns to see metal tentacles ripping the highway up out of the asphalt. "Hello, Peter," says a voice he has never heard. Doctor Octopus — Alfred Molina, reprising his Spider-Man 2 (2004) role, identical to the day — is yanking a yellow-and-black-streaked Spider-Man backwards through traffic by the throat. "I thought you'd be older." Peter is wearing the black-and-gold Iron Spider suit. Doc Ock has never seen this Peter. He's after the Tobey Maguire Peter, the one he tried to kill seventeen years ago in his timeline. They fight on a bridge above the Hudson. Doc Ock rips Peter's nanotech core off his chest with one tentacle — and the nanites swarm Ock's metal arms instead, hard-overriding his Octavius-built mind-control inhibitor. Doc Ock falls limp. Peter swings him to the ground.

Peter takes Doc Ock to the Sanctum, where Strange has been busy. Other visitors have been arriving — a glowing Electro (Jamie Foxx, reprising his Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) role, this time without the Magenta hair) was just blasting people in a New Jersey forest. Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, last seen in Spider-Man 3 (2007)) materialized over a Manhattan highway and tried to walk home to his daughter. The Lizard, from The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), climbed out of a sewer. And in a Pittsburgh gas station, a man's reflection started talking back to him — Norman Osborn, Willem Dafoe reprising his Goblin from Raimi's Spider-Man (2002), except now lucid and terrified. Strange has lured them all to the Sanctum's holding cells with simple bait: someone in a Spider-Man suit. Strange tells Peter the spell pulled them across the multiverse from their realities — every man here who knew Peter Parker as Spider-Man — and now they all need to go back. Peter says fine. Strange says "all of them die when they go back. That's their fate." Peter freezes.

He looks at Doc Ock — fixed, no longer mind-controlled, looking around like a man who just woke up — and he can't do it. He grabs the Macchina di Kadavus, dropkicks Strange through a portal into the mirror dimension, and runs out of the Sanctum with the entire box. He's going to fix them first. May agrees with him. Happy doesn't. Ned and MJ are with him on faith. They drag the five villains to Happy Hogan's condo because it's the only safe house left.

The cures start in a kitchen lab Peter sets up on Happy's countertop. He synthesizes a chemical reversal for Lizard. He builds a cranial inhibitor chip for Doc Ock. He works on a containment power-cell for Electro. Sandman is harder; nobody knows what to do with him yet. Then Norman Osborn — the gentle, terrified version — looks at his reflection in Happy's window and his face changes. His shoulders square. He grins. The Green Goblin is back. He stabs the chemistry table. He fries the Doc Ock chip. He recruits Electro and Sandman to his side and offers Lizard cells off-screen. He blows the front of Happy's condo open with a pumpkin bomb and aerials out on his glider. Aunt May runs out into the rubble to help Peter to his feet. The Goblin loops back. He glides at them with the glider's spike-prow aimed at Peter's chest. Aunt May shoves Peter out of the way and takes the strike herself.

She dies on the floor of Happy's wrecked condo. Peter is holding her hand. "You did the right thing," she tells him. "With great power…" She doesn't finish. He does. "…there must also come great responsibility." The line that has anchored every Spider-Man movie since 2002 finally enters the MCU through May's mouth instead of Uncle Ben's, and the weight of that recoded inheritance is the entire grief of the film in seven words. May's eyes close. Peter, on the bathroom floor of Happy's hotel hours later, can't move.

Ned, holding Strange's confiscated sling ring without knowing what it does, twirls his hand and says "I wish I could find Peter." A portal opens. A skinny young man in a faded blue-and-red suit steps out. He looks at Ned. He's not Peter. He's Peter, but he's not their Peter. He's Andrew Garfield's Peter — Peter-3 — pulled from his own grieving timeline, jet-lagged and confused. Ned twirls again. "I want to find Peter Parker." Another portal opens. Tobey Maguire's Peter — Peter-2, older, in a suit slightly faded at the seams, gray at the temples — walks through. The three of them, on a Manhattan rooftop, take a beat to process each other. Tobey's Peter is married to Mary Jane now. Andrew's Peter has been alone since Gwen Stacy died. Their Peter is the kid in the room.

The three of them rebuild Peter's cures together — three different brains, three engineering backgrounds, three doses of grief in one room. Tobey's Peter walks his counterpart through the breath-control technique he uses to keep his powers stable. Andrew's Peter, who has been a wreck since Gwen Stacy fell off a bell tower in his hands, helps with Doc Ock's neural inhibitor because his lab background was bioengineering. They bait the five villains to the Statue of Liberty — the place where the Captain America shield was being installed on top of Liberty's torch for a Captain America 80th-anniversary monument exhibit. (The shield is a half-built scaffold prop on the Statue's crown the entire fight.) MJ and Ned man the cure inventory on the catwalk. The three Spider-Men swing in.

The fight is the cleanest, most playful, most generous superhero set-piece Marvel has put on screen since the first Avengers (2012). Andrew's Peter cures Lizard with the antidote — Curt Connors comes back, dazed, grateful. Tobey's Peter calms Sandman down by talking to him about Penny, his daughter. He hands him a tube. Sandman lets himself be glassed back into ordinary sand particles and stored for transit home. Doc Ock — already cured, on their side — swings on metal tentacles and slams Electro with his own power-cell mod. Andrew throws himself off the torch to catch MJ when she falls — the moment everyone in the theater in 2021 had to put down their popcorn for — and he catches her. Hands first. He's crying. So is the audience. He whispers "I got you." Then Green Goblin gets at Tom Holland's Peter on the Liberty's deck. They fight on Lady Liberty's broken stone arm. Goblin breaks his web-shooter. Peter punches him in the face thirty times and raises Goblin's own glider to drive into his back — and Tobey Maguire's Peter catches his wrist mid-swing. "Don't. You can save him. Save him, Peter. So you don't end up like me." Holland's Peter drops the glider. He stabs Goblin with the cure syringe. Norman Osborn is back. Crying. "Peter, I'm sorry."

Strange, freshly liberated from the Mirror Dimension by Ned, arrives at the Statue and tells Peter the spell is collapsing — every multiverse villain who has ever known Peter Parker is now coming through. Doctor Connors, Eddie Brock-Venom, the entire rogue's gallery from every reality is going to pour in. Peter, holding May's funeral pamphlet in his pocket, looks at Strange. "There's another way. Make them forget me. Everyone. Including MJ. Including Ned." Strange tries to argue. Peter insists. "There's no other way." Strange raises his hands.

Before the spell completes, Peter sprints across the Brooklyn Bridge in the swing, finds MJ in a hospital bed, tells her he'll find her again afterward and explain. She makes him promise. He promises. The spell hits. Across the multiverse, Tobey's Peter, Andrew's Peter, Doc Ock, Sandman, Electro, Lizard, Norman Osborn — every man who ever knew Peter Parker as Spider-Man — get pulled back to their own realities. The spell on Earth-616 closes itself. Every person in the world who has ever heard the name Peter Parker forgets him completely.

Two weeks later. Peter walks into a coffee shop in Queens. MJ is behind the counter. She's working there because the spell scrubbed her future too — no MIT, no Stark scholarship, just a barista apron and a half-healed forehead bandage. He's about to tell her. He looks at the bandage. He looks at her tired smile. He orders a black coffee and lets her be safe. He pays. He leaves. Outside, Ned walks past him on the sidewalk and they don't recognize each other. Peter is alone in a snow-globe of a New York he saved twice and can't be seen in. He goes back to his rented studio apartment, opens a sewing machine, and stitches his own homemade Spider-Man suit by hand — red, blue, web pattern, eye lenses cut from broken sunglasses. He puts it on. He sticks to the side of his window. He swings out over the rooftops as snow falls on the city. End movie.

Mid-credits: a beachside bar in Mexico from Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021). Eddie Brock is on his fifth beer trying to explain to a bartender what an Avenger is. The screen above the bar plays the Doctor Strange Sanctum collapse from this film's third act. Eddie blinks. "Holy shit." Then he and the symbiote get yanked out of the universe mid-sentence. They leave behind a tiny black puddle of Venom on the bar — the symbiote sample that arrives in Earth-616 and seeds Spider-Man 4. Post-credits: the full trailer for Multiverse of Madness (2022), four months out — Strange opening a portal in space, Wanda's red-eyed cameo, the title card slamming in.