What does Spider-Man: No Way Home’s title reveal about the movie?
Is Peter Parker on the run, or is he trapped in a parallel world?
It’s official – Tom Holland’s third Spider-Man movie finally has a title, with the upcoming Sony/Marvel threequel confirmed to be called Spider-Man: No Way Home via a tongue-in-cheek video released on social media.
Finally, all the pointless speculation about what the new film will be called can stop – and at last, all the pointless speculation about what the title means can begin. Because beyond the recurring “Home” motif seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home, there’s actually a few interesting readings of what No Way Home could be referring to.
First up, picking up from the end of Far From Home, we shouldn’t forget that Holland’s Peter Parker has been exposed. The whole world knows Spider-Man’s secret identity and he’s suspected of murder, and it’s hard to imagine the next film will ignore that huge cliffhanger no matter how many exciting multiverse guest stars are being speculated about.
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With this in mind, perhaps No Way Home refers to Peter being on the run in the wake of Quentin Beck’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) death, with no way back to his old life and privacy now that he’s been outed and the police on his tail, meaning he literally can’t go home.
It’s a dark possibility for the series that it’s hard to see Peter resolving – but it isn’t even the most extreme reading for this new title. What if the home he can’t get back to is bigger than an apartment in Queens – what if instead, it’s his own reality?
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As mentioned, there have been plenty of rumours that No Way Home will feature a multiverse storyline, possible involving former Spider-Men like Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield and villains like Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock and Jamie Foxx’s Electro. The film might also lead into the similarly-themed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which is rumoured to count Holland among its cast and will take a horror-themed delve into parallel realities.
If Peter did somehow get sucked into a parallel world – perhaps even the worlds of the Maguire and Garfield Spider-Men, among others – the title could refer to his struggles to get back “home,” in other words to the world he knows.
How exactly a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man would master interdimensional travel is less clear, though there are some clues about how it could go down. An early press shot shows Peter and his friends standing in Strange’s magical Sanctum Santorum, so perhaps there could be some magical artefact involved that Peter tries to use to hide his identity once more, which goes wrong and instead transports him, MJ and Ned (Zendaya and Jacob Batalon) to different worlds.
This idea could take some inspiration from Spider-Man’s One More Day comic storyline, which saw Peter make a deal with WandaVision theory favourite Mephisto to wipe his identity from the world’s minds and resurrect his deceased Aunt May at the cost of his relationship with MJ. Combine that with the classic 1960s Wand of Watoomb stories that first saw Spidey and Doctor Strange team up to save an artefact from an evil wizard (and included bits where Spider-Man was thrown into a mystical dimension), and we begin to see the sort of story No Way Home could be telling take shape.
Of course, in the finished movie it could be that No Way Home has some even greater significance that we don’t yet know about, and we’re sure fans will be on the case deciphering more clues as they arrive.
But for now, it’s already looking like this could be the darkest adventure yet for Peter Parker and his friends. Here’s hoping the cast and crew can bring it home.
Spider-Man: No Way Home will be released on 17th December 2021. Want more? Check out our full TV Guide or our dedicated Sci-Fi page.
