Spider-Man: No Way Home Guide: Where to Watch, Cast and Runtime

The multiverse crossover that needed three Spider-Men

The film’s entire 2021 marketing campaign was built around a secret that there is no reason to protect five years later, so here it is plainly: Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is not the only Spider-Man in this movie. Peter asks Doctor Strange to make the world forget he is Spider-Man, the spell breaks, and it starts pulling in people who know Peter Parker is Spider-Man from other universes — villains first (Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Electro, Sandman, the Lizard, each pulled from an earlier, separate Spider-Man franchise), and eventually Andrew Garfield’s and Tobey Maguire’s own Spider-Men as well.

It is the finale of the Homecoming trilogy, and it only works because it pays off everything that trilogy built: Ned and MJ already know Peter’s secret, Happy is still around, May still runs the apartment. The returning villains are not reintroduced from scratch — the film assumes a working memory of who they are and spends none of its runtime on second origin stories. That is the tradeoff the whole movie makes: the newcomer-friendly openness of Homecoming and Far From Home is gone, replaced by continuity being the entire point.

Watch it after Homecoming and Far From Home; it is the correct chronological finish to that run, and the magic that goes wrong here is also the direct lead-in to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. If the three-Spider-Men idea is what brought you here, it is worth knowing it is not connected to the other big-screen Spider-Man multiverse story: our Into the Spider-Verse guide and Across the Spider-Verse guide cover Miles Morales’s animated side of the same idea, with a different cast and a completely separate continuity. The production record has the full cast and crew.