Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield have returned to their Peter Parker/Spider-Man roles for No Way Home. That’s the biggest spoiler in Marvel’s MCU history, a secret that leaked over and over this year. We have seen plenty of believable leaks so far, but Sony and Marvel are still trying to deny everything. Their current strategy with marketing materials is to only focus on Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and the iconic Spider-Man villains he will face. But it turns out that the movie’s marketing campaign might have made another mistake, giving us an official look at what appears to be Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man.
We’ll warn you that spoilers follow below, but you’ve already seen this major spoiler a hundred times.
We already saw the 3 Spider-Men from No Way Home
If you’ve been following No Way Home spoilers closely, you already know that we saw Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man suit a couple of times. One of the leaked images from late summer showed Garfield and Maguire atop scaffolding in Spider-Man suits. Sony ended up confirming the blurry image by filing copyright claims against it.
We then spotted what might be Maguire’s hand in the now-infamous Garfield video leak. Finally, we had that massive leak that preceded the No Way Home trailer 2 release. All three actors wearing Spider-Man uniforms appeared in that one.
But these aren’t official confirmations from Sony or Marvel. The studios have not yet officially confirmed that the two actors are in the movie.
Moreover, Maguire has been missing in action lately. He didn’t have any new movies to promote, so he avoided all the No Way Home questions that would have come up during press tours. Garfield, on the other hand, wasn’t as lucky. We saw him try to deny his No Way Home role more than once while promoting Netflix’s Tick Tick Boom. Needless to say, we never bought those denials.
The surprising Tobey Maguire Spider-Man leak
Twitter user @dominic_kravitz was the first person to post the following video online.
Here's a video of what I got in the bark box. Just in case you thought the image was fake. pic.twitter.com/D6WWrjYv36
— Dom (@Dominic_kravitz) November 25, 2021
We’re looking at officially licensed No Way Home merchandise via BarkBox. That’s a monthly subscription for dog products, which recently launched a No Way Home-themed box. Needless to say, this type of promotion requires companies to license materials for promotion on their packaging.
That means Marvel and Sony’s own promotional efforts are responsible for this new leak.
It’s the inside of the box that’s exciting, as it features an image of Spider-Man. The image features black-and-white sections alternating with full-color ones. It’s in one of the black-and-white sections that we an unusual Spider-Man figure. Or better said, the head of a masked Spider-Man.
Upon closer inspection, you’ll realize that’s not Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, but Maguire’s.
As The Direct points out, that image comes from one of the Daily Bugle’s cover photos that showed Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man in the Sam Raimi movies. It’s the exact same image.
The simplest explanation for the surprising No Way Home revelation is that it’s all a mistake. We saw a big editing mistake in trailer 2 that confirmed Sony and Marvel deleted big characters from the movie’s final battle scenes.
But what if it’s deliberate? That mesh of black and white images conveys the same message as the rest of the No Way Home marketing campaign. This is a multiverse movie, so we’ll get plenty of references to those alternate universes. That includes Maguire’s Spider-Man universe, of course.
