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There will be spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home from here on out, but they’re restricted to characters that didn’t appear in the movie, as opposed to those who did.
As soon as it was announced that Tom Holland’s latest web-slinging blockbuster was going to be multiversal in nature, almost everybody to have appeared in one of the previous seven live-action movies found themselves being linked with a cameo appearance.
While there are plenty of surprise guests throughout the film, two notable absentees didn’t make their presence felt. An early casting report indicated that Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson and Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy were set to drop by, but No Way Home comes and goes without a sighting, although both are name-dropped.
In an interview with The New York Times, Kevin Feige addressed the scuttlebutt, admitting that he didn’t want to overstuff with No Way Home with familiar faces to the detriment of Holland’s Peter Parker and his constant setbacks remaining the focus of the narrative.
“When people see the movie, they will understand. It’s about the story. It was a big goal for all of us — Amy and Jon and our writers, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers — that Peter Parker’s senior year in high school didn’t get lost amid the insanity that ensues thanks to his encounter with Doctor Strange. That easily could have happened. And that’s the reason there’s not another 20 people in the movie.”
For what it’s worth, Dunst and Stone both denied that they were set for Spider-Man: No Way Home, and they turned out to be telling the truth despite the fact not a lot of folks actually believed them.