Although it seems impossible now to think of Spider-Man: No Way Home not having Green Goblin as the main villain of the film, screenwriter Chris McKenna has revealed that it was not always the plan to have Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn front and center of the movie. Although he would not divulge exactly who was at one point set to be Spider-Man's main antagonist in Tom Holland's third solo outing as the web-slinger, McKenna discussed the changing script with Gold Derby during an awards season chat.

"This movie went through a rapid change. [Green Goblin] was not the main villain of this movie. For like the whole first version of the script, he was not the main villain. He was a villain. And then we lost other characters, and then we kept on going, 'It has to be him. He's the one who now is the antagonist of the movie. We have to make him the antagonist," the writer said.

As the script went through numerous cycles, Dafoe’s Goblin just would not stop rising to the top of the list of usual suspects. "So we were evolving the script as we were writing it and shooting it, and it was, 'Oh, Goblin/Norman has to be the villain. How do we do that?' And so he became the centerpiece of the movie that he was at first not the centerpiece of. Goblin was there, but he was not [the main villain].”

McKenna concluded, "Then it became clear to all of us, 'Wait, no, he has to be the other side of May. He has to be the main villain of this.' He has to have been given a second chance and he was still doing what he was doing in the first movie [2002's Spider-Man], but in a darker way that now relates to our Peter Parker.

Spider-Man: No Way Home Was Always Going End Up With Green Goblin As Its Antagonist

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More than any other movie in the MCU, Spider-Man: No Way Home had a huge amount of nostalgia attached to it thanks to the number of returning characters from the previous Sony Spider-Man movies, and for that reason, Willem Dafoe’s Goblin was always the most likely to end up as the central villain of the piece. While Spider-Man has faced many foes, both on screen and in the comic books, Green Goblin was his first big screen antagonist and has faced off with Spidey in many forms in the comics.

When a movie has been set up with as much of a throwback feel as Spider-Man: No Way Home managed to do while also staying fresh, there always has to be one huge thing to tie it all together. Tobey Maguire faced off against Dafoe's Goblin in 2002, so it was only fitting that Holland should bring that fight full circle and also have a personal battle with Osborn's darker alter-ego. In doing so, Maguire and Dafoe found themselves claiming a Guinness World Record as the longest-serving actors in Marvel roles. In the end, whoever would have replaced the Goblin if one of those earlier scripts had been used, everyone seems to agree that the version of Spider-Man: No Way Home we got is the one that we needed to have.