Warning: This post contains MAJOR spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.
plunged Peter Parker (Tom Holland) into his most difficult adventure yet. Faced with villains from alternate realities who all have axes to grind with Spider-Man, Peter spends much of No Way Home working to craft a better future for these bad guys.
Unfortunately, Peter's good heart doesn't come without some sacrifice. A bit more than halfway through Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter suffers his biggest loss yet when Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) dies at the hands of the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Though Norman Osborn appeared to be in control up until that point, his villainous Green Goblin persona wins over and launches a pumpkin bomb right at Aunt May. She initially seems to emerge from the wreckage unscathed, but ultimately succumbs to her wounds despite Peter's best efforts.
Aunt May's death is perhaps the most heart-wrenching moment in Spider-Man: No Way Home outside of its game-changing ending, and it was not one the writers decided upon lightly. Speaking to Variety about all of No Way Home's twists and surprises, Sommers and McKenna explained how they came to the decision to kill May, stating it came from a need to saddle Peter with a shocking loss. Sommers said:
“We were at a point where we felt like there needed to be a loss, a sacrifice, that Peter needed to pay a real price for this decision to try to save the villains. I think it became pretty clear to a lot of us that losing Aunt May was the thing that would really drive home the point we were trying to make: making this the movie where Peter Parker experiences the loss that the other ones did in their first movies.”
As May was the one who pushed Peter to show the villains comion, her death hits the young hero even harder once the guilt sets in. McKenna added that, as a result, "Then he started questioning that morality in a way that he never really questioned because he hasn’t been put to the test in that way." This allows Spider-Man: No Way Home to give Holland's Peter a poignant moment with his predecessors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield wherein they share stories of their own losses. Peter's initial reaction to Aunt May's death is to seek revenge, but Maguire and Garfield's characters urge him towards a different path.
As many have noted, May has now become Holland's version of Uncle Ben. In most versions of Peter Parker's origins, Uncle Ben's death is the tragic sacrifice that affects his arc as Spider-Man. The MCU's version of the character has avoided it, and Spider-Man: No Way Home has officially flipped the script on the typical Parker story. As Sommers said, May's death was born from a desire to give Holland's Peter the loss the other Peters experienced, and while the MCU had the character grieve Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), this is far more in line with the Uncle Ben loss. It can't have been an easy decision, but it ultimately played vital role in Spider-Man's continuing MCU arc.
Source: Variety
