Despite burning expectations that the new Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer would finally confirm the biggest open secret in superhero movies — that Andrew Garfield and/or Tobey Maguire would reprise their roles — the studio has decided to hold their tongue for a little longer.The upcoming third Spider-Man movie of the current series, Spider-Man: No Way Home, has released its long-awaited trailer and the one thing it doesn’t feature is the one thing fans have been clamouring to see – Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire suiting up as Peter Parker alongside Tom Holland. Or did they actually sneak one in? Scroll down for our theory.Meanwhile, the Green Goblin is definitely back!If that sentence gave you a little jolt of excitement, then you already understand the stakes and you can watch the trailer and continue counting down the days until the film’s release – which is in 29 days, by the way.But if that sentence just read like a bunch of nonsense to you, buckle in.Spider-Man: No Way Home is the third movie in the current trilogy to feature British actor Holland as the webslinger. He was introduced in the 2016 MCU movie Captain America: Civil War and also appeared in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame as well as the Spider-Man movies Homecoming and Far From Home.Holland’s iteration of Spider-Man is the third live-action Spider-Man series this century. Sam Raimi kicked off one franchise in 2002 with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. The pair made three movies together.In 2012, director Marc Webb rebooted Spider-Man again, this time with Garfield in the title role in The Amazing Spider-Man. They made two movies.The reason there have been so many Spider-Men this century is Sony Pictures owns the screen rights to the character and the studio had to make one every few years or it would revert back to Marvel Entertainment, which is now owned by Disney.Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures struck a deal some years ago to collaborate on Spider-Man movies so the character could be incorporated into the expansive MCU, which is how Holland’s Spider-Man came to be fighting alongside Iron Man and Black Panther.So, if Garfield and Maguire’s Spider-Men aren’t in the MCU, then how come they’re expected to be in this upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home movie?Because Marvel Studios has introduced the multiverse, essentially parallel universes in which there are different versions of the same characters which can exist in the same narrative universe.It’s what rival DC Comics does with its screen adaptations – for example, why Taylor Hoechlin can play Superman on TV and Henry Cavill does it in films, or why Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix have played versions of Joker on screen recently.With Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel and Sony will now fold all the competing versions of Spider-Man into one multiverse, which essentially retroactively confirms Raimi and Webb’s movies as canon.We already knew the multiverse is going to feature in No Way Home because a previous trailer had shown Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, who was a villain in the second Maguire movie, while Jamie Foxx, who was in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, has featured on the confirmed cast list.Foxx pops up in this new trailer, as does Doc Ock, as well as direct references to “visitors” from other worlds. Doc Ock even says to Holland’s Spider-Man that he’s not Peter Parker. The multiverse is alive and kicking.And there is a chance that Garfield and Maguire are hiding in the trailer, but just inside the Spidey suit – it’s like we know for certain that every time the suit shows up, it’s Holland’s version inside.Take, for example, this scene towards the end of the trailer where MJ is falling off some scaffolding, and Holland’s Peter dives after her to catch her. He’s wearing his black-and-red suit but in the next shot, when there’s a close-up of a Spider-Man’s hand reaching for MJ, it looks like a blue-and-red hand. Now, that could be tricky editing – or possibly colour-blindness on our part – but who wants to bet that’s either Garfield or Maguire’s Spider-Man reaching out for MJ?The MCU movies – all 25 of them so far – are structured in phases and the multiverse is woven through Phase Four (Phase Four started with Black Widow).The multiverse was a heavy component of the Loki streaming series – the finale of that Disney+ show portrayed the main reality branching off into multiple ones – while it was also teased in the post-credit scene of WandaVision.What we know of Spider-Man: No Way Home is that Peter will ask Doctor Strange to alter his reality so that the world will forget that he’s Spider-Man, which was a plot point at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home.The film is directed by Jon Watts and co-stars Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Wong, Tony Revolori, Hannibal Buress, Angourie Rice and J.K. Simmons.Spider-Man: No Way Home is in cinemas on December 16Share your movies and TV obsessions | @wenleima
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