No Way Home Showed A Villain Fight Marvel Had Been Teasing For Tobey Maguire"s Spider-Man For 18 Years

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One fight in Spider-Man: No Way Home was teased 18 years before the film’s release. No Way Home’s multiversal premise sees not only five classic Spider-Man movie villains brought to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but both of their respective Spider-Man variants as well. No Way Home brought three generations of cinematic Spider-Man iterations together, but its melding of the Sam Raimi, Marc Webb, and MCU Spider-Man franchises also led to fascinating interactions between Spider-Man variants and supervillains from other realities. One such conflict has an interesting history in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man universe.
In the third act of No Way Home, all three Spider-Man iterations fight together to defeat and depower Sandman, The Lizard, and Electro. Early on in this sequence, Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man is shown battling The Amazing Spider-Man universe’s Lizard, with the web-slinger more than holding his own against the antagonist. Fascinatingly, there were two previous instances of Maguire’s Spider-Man fighting The Lizard in some form, with the first being in a spinoff that is only tied to the first Raimi movie, while the second is set in ancillary material that is connected to the MCU timeline and No Way Home.
Spider-Man's First Lizard Fight Isn't Quite Canon Close 2003’s Spider-Man: The New Animated Series was originally intended to be the canonical follow-up to 2002’s Spider-Man. The series is set a year after the first Sam Raimi film and directly references it in its 13-episode run. Despite this, the series has many irreconcilable continuity conflicts with Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, making it part of a branching timeline, similar to the MC2 comics which overlap with Marvel’s 616 universe until the end of The Clone Saga. One of the many continuity issues with Spider-Man: The New Animated Series concerns Curt Connors and his transformation into The Lizard.
The canonical novelization of Spider-Man 2 establishes that Dr. Curt Connors was a combat medic who lost his arm to a mortar during a battle.
In the show’s third episode – “Law of the Jungle” – Doctor Curt Connors is established to have lost his arm while working for Oscorp Technologies, leading him to experiment with regenerative serums to regrow the limb, resulting in his accidental transformation into The Lizard. As The Lizard, Connors seeks revenge against Oscorp (including Harry Osborn) and his eventual battle with Spider-Man ends with Connors dying. This, of course, means that The New Animated Series is not part of the same continuity as the rest of the Raimi trilogy.
Spider-Man Fought The Lizard Offscreen In Spider-Man 3 Close Like the novel adaptations, the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy’s video game adaptations are canonical parts of the franchise, with the games adapting the films’ respective plots but also adding new characters and storylines to the main Raimi continuity. Thanks to the video games, novelizations, and spinoff comics, the Raimi Spider-Man universe has far more Spider-Man villains – and other Marvel superheroes – than the movies suggest. The Spider-Man 3 video game specifically has Dr. Curt Connors become The Lizard, battle Spider-Man on multiple occasions, and be cured of his transformation during the events of the movie.
Since the broad strokes of the Spider-Man 3 game’s extra storylines do not contradict the movie, they can be accepted as canon, but the unmade Spider-Man 4 could have contradicted the game, perhaps making the Lizard storyline non-canon. Spider-Man 4 would have featured several supervillains, including The Vulture, Black Cat, and The Lizard. The movie most likely would have had a different version of Connors’s transformation into the Lizard and conflicts with Spider-Man, and the Spider-Man 3 game’s version of the same events would most likely not have been referenced.
Spider-Man's Previous Fight With The Lizard Makes No Way Home More Meaningful Close Viewers who wished to see The Lizard in Sam Raimi"s Spider-Man 4 no doubt found Maguire’s battle with the Amazing universe’s Lizard to be cathartic, but the Spider-Man 3 game makes their fight even more meaningful. The Raimi universe’s Spider-Man is the most experienced of the three Spider-Man variants in No Way Home, making his relative nonchalance during the battle appropriate. The fact that Maguire’s Spider-Man has already fought his universe’s version of The Lizard – and cured him – over a decade before Spider-Man: No Way Home makes his composure and the movie fight itself even more meaningful.

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44 8.8/10 Spider-Man: No Way Home For the first time in the cinematic history of Spider-Man, our friendly neighborhood hero is unmasked and no longer able to separate his normal life from the trials and tribulations of being a superhero. In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asks for help from Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) when his identity becomes a problem for the ones he loves. Unfortunately, when the spell goes wrong, Spider-Man will now have to face off with villains such as Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) and Electro (Jamie Foxx) as Peter finally comes to terms that he can't run from being Spider-Man. Supported by his close friends and help from an unexpected place (or multiverse), Spider-Man will go toe-to-toe with some of the most legendary foes in his storied history.
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