Spider-Man: No Way Home Star Says Film is “Dark, Sad & Brutal”

All the rumors and questions will be finally be answered (with either delight or disappointment depending on which ones audiences set their hearts on seeing), next month when Spider-Man: No Way Home finally arrives in theaters.

The introduction of the multiverse to the Marvel Cinematic Universe has created a can of worms that has opened up a litany of possibilities as to which characters will now be entering the Marvel chronology. Spider-Man: No Way Home has also been seen as containing the worst-kept Marvel secrets of the year, with us having already seen Doc Ock from Spider-Man 2 (2002) return in the first trailer, and a new poster that now confirms the return of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, along with what we already knew about Electro and Sandman. That leaves only a sliver of doubt about the involvement of The Lizard, Venom, Matt Murdock (who has recently been speculated to feature thanks to new photographs leaked), and, of potentially even Deadpool.

Most of the speculation however centers on the possibility that we might see previous actors that have played the wallcrawler who had already dealt with those villains. While Marvel Studios and Sony are reportedly fighting over whether or not to feature “those two characters” in the final trailer, Tom Holland has been revealing more about the film’s tone in the current issue of Total Film, which may not be pleasant news to many fans of his web-slinging hero.

Holland made it clear in a recent interview with Total Film:

“What people will be really surprised about is that it’s not fun, this film. It’s dark and it’s sad, and it’s going to be really affecting. You’re going to see characters that you love go through things that you would never wish for them to go through. And I was just really excited to kind of lean into that side of Peter Parker. Peter Parker is always someone who’s looking up. He’s always really positive. He’s always like, ‘I can fix this. I can do this.’ Whereas in this film, he feels like he’s met his match. He’s like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ That was an aspect of the character that I’d never seen before, and I was really, really excited to try to tackle. I haven’t seen the film yet but I’ve seen pieces of the film, and it’s the best work we’ve ever done. It’s the best Spider-Man film that we’ve ever made. I really don’t think fans are at all ready for what they’ve put together. I know that I’m not ready, and I know that it’s going to be brutal.”

Previous MCU Spider-Man films have been among of the more lighthearted chapters in Marvel’s Infinity Saga, but as we enter Phase Four and Kevin Feige’s ever-failing “new beginnings” era, it appears that the tone could all change in this film, which Holland has already stated feels like a story ending. Will it also be the start of a new story that isn’t part of the MCU?

Sinister Six maybe?