Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Culture

The Manual may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site.

Check Out the First Three Minutes of ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Before Friday’s Release

By
Tom Holland's Spider-Man tries to convince Doc Ock he doesn't know the villain.
Tom Holland’s Spider-Man tries to convince Doc Ock he doesn’t know the villain. Marvel/YouTube

“Hi? Do I know you?” a flummoxed Tom Holland asks soon-to-be just-as mixed-up Doc Ock at the beginning of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The most anticipated Spider-Man film in the series comes out tomorrow. Before the film drops, check out the first three minutes, released on Monday on YouTube. If the tense opening hook and a promising first look carry any weight, No Way Home is going to be great. 

Recommended Videos

After the mix-up with Doc Ock, the film flips to ‘Early That Day’ when Parker’s wish to be a forgotten web-slinger goes very awry. Before fans can place too much blame on Holland-as-Parker, this Spider-Man seems to have had his hand forced. For the first time in Spidey’s cinematic history, the neighborhood hero who is just trying to maintain a normal life is unmasked. J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, editor-in-chief of the fictional Daily Bugle, appears on national television and the Times Square big screen, revealing the identity of his nemesis like an old school carnival barker. 

“That’s right folks, Spider-Man is in fact, Peter Parker,” Jameson says. “People who looked up to this boy and called him a hero. Well, I’ll tell you what I call him: Public enemy number one!”

Just as Parker feared, Spidey’s responsibilities are brought into stark conflict with his normal life, placing those he cares about most in danger. After ignoring a clear warning not to cast Doctor Strange’s spell to make everybody forget Parker is Spider-Man, the multiverse tears when an indecisive Parker can’t stop messing with it. 

Related Guides

Instead of creating anonymity, the enchantment backfires, pulling Parker and Spider-Man’s friends, families, and enemies in from alternate universes. This includes the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), and others. In case you’ve already taken the next logical step, yes, this means other Spider-Men will follow. 

After months of speculation, it’s been confirmed that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield reprise their roles as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in No Way Home and it’s every bit as glorious as people could have hoped. (Regrettably, this doesn’t include Spider-Ham like it did in Into the Spider-Verse.)

So far, critical reviews are almost universally positive. BBC Culture gave No Way Home five stars while praising the depth it brings to all Spider-Men and his/their archenemies. The film earned a 95% ‘Certified Fresh’ rating on RottenTomatoes.com with papers from coast to coast, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post, all lauding the film for its focus on character development.

Spider-Man: No Way Home opens in theaters nationwide tomorrow. To get a taste of the film’s plot and characters, make sure to check out its first few minutes.

Read More: Marvel Confirms Charlie Cox to Return as Daredevil

Editors’ Recommendations

Matthew Denis
Matthew Denis
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Matt Denis is an on-the-go remote multimedia reporter, exploring arts, culture, and the existential in the Pacific Northwest…
The best sci-fi shows streaming right now
From Lost to The Twilight Zone, these are the best sci-fi shows ever made
The cast of Lost.

Sci-fi television has been around since the earliest days of the medium, and it's evolved along with the rest of television. In every era, though, there have been great sci-fi shows that remind us of how well the genre can fit on television.

Great science fiction can reflect on the world we know, even as it expands our understanding of what's possible. Regardless of exactly what these shows are about, though, each of them tells their story in gripping fashion, taking full advantage of what TV is capable of.

Read more
‘The Brutalist’ director Brady Corbet says he’s made no money promoting the film
The director said that he makes more directing commercials than he does making movies.
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

It can be wonderful to get nominated for a bunch of awards, but The Brutalist director Brady Corbet said that it's not exactly a profitable one. In an interview on WTF with Marc Maron, Corbet said that he hadn't actually made any money promoting the movie.

“This is the first time I’ve made any money in years,” Corbet said, saying that his first real paycheck in a long time came from directing three advertisements in Portugal. “Both my partner and I made zero dollars on the last two films we made. Yes, actually zero. So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago and obviously, the timing during an awards campaign and travel every two or three days was less than ideal, but it was an opportunity that landed in my lap, and I jumped at it.”

Read more
John Malkovich said that he rejected Marvel movies prior to ‘Fantastic Four’ over low pay
He explained that Marvel movies took a lot of time, and he wanted to be paid accordingly.
John Malkovich in Fantastic Four

Over the course of its 15 years of existence, Marvel has lured a number of surprising actors into its orbit. We live in a world where Angelina Jolie and Harry Styles have both appeared in Marvel projects (actually the same one).

John Malkovich was one of the last Marvel holdouts, but that's changing with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In an interview with GQ, Malkovich explained that he had been approached to do Marvel projects in the past, but had always turned them down.
“The reason I didn’t do them had nothing to do with any artistic considerations whatsoever,” Malkovich explained. “I didn’t like the deals they made, at all.”
He explained that he simply wanted more money to work through the conditions required to make a movie on this scale.
“These films are quite grueling to make…. If you’re going to hang from a crane in front of a green screen for six months, pay me. You don’t want to pay me, it’s cool, but then I don’t want to do it, because I’d rather be onstage, or be directing a play, or doing something else," he continued.
Malkovich is, perhaps unsurprisingly, playing villain Ivan Kragoff, also known as Red Ghost in the film. He explained that working on the movie was actually like stage work in some respects. "It’s not that dissimilar to doing theater,” he said, “You imagine a bunch of stuff that isn’t there and do your little play.”

Read more