As Spider-Man: No Way Home took its rightful place as the highest audience rated movie of all time on Rotten Tomatoes, it seems that the film’s writers believe that it could have been even better as there was a lot of “great moments” that were cut from the film as they didn’t directly affect the story. While fans may have been enthralled by the third solo outing by Tom Holland’s web-slinger, as he faced off against old adversaries that other iterations of Peter Parker have fought in other Spider-Man universes, Erik Sommers revealed to Discussing Film, that in making sure the movie remained a Peter Parker story, there were a lot of other great character moments that didn’t make the cut.

In the month leading up to the arrival of Spider-Man: No Way Home in cinemas, there were a number of different runtimes leaked on posters and cinema websites, some suggesting that film would be coming in at almost three hours at one point. While we now know that this wasn’t the case, judging by the comments from Sommers and fellow writer Chris McKenna, any of those longer runtimes could have been a possibility. Sommers said:

“At the end of the day, it’s a Spider-Man movie – you have to be telling the story of Peter Parker, and everything has to be in service of that. So there were a lot of painful decisions made, you know, we would have loved to have done this and that and 'Oh, wouldn’t be great if these two villains could do this!' But it has to be in service of Peter’s journey, and you have to keep things moving. There were definitely a lot of what we call 'little darlings' – little moments and things that you really just love – but sometimes you have to let them go.”

One thing we don’t know is whether these scenes were all filmed and then removed later to tighten the movie’s focus, or if they only made it to one of the early drafts of the script. After cramming so much into the final runtime, it is hard to think that anything added back in could make the movie any better, but regardless of that, if there are scenes out there then we will no doubt see them appearing in bonus material when the movie arrives on Blu-ray and digital sometime early next year.

Spider-Man: No Way Home has brought 2021 to a close in a way that even the most avid Marvel fan could not have predicted, with the film overtaking Avengers: Infinity War to have the second highest opening in movie history, setting up a number of clues to Marvel’s future and showing that it is possible to revisit old movies without simply relying on fan-service or nostalgia. Now, it seems inconceivable to believe that Spider-Man: No Way Home will not very quickly become the first $1 billion movie since the pandemic began, and there is one thing for certain; anyone who still questioned whether the MCU had a story to tell in the wake of Avengers: Endgame should finally have had all doubts wiped from their minds.