Spider-Man No Way Home Script Changes A Key Moment In The Ending

Spider-Man fans still haven't gotten over No Way Home's heartbreaking ending, but we have some new information that might provide some hope.

To give a recap in case you need it, the MCU epic sees Peter Parker tell Doctor Strange to cast a spell to make everybody forget Peter Parker. It's because of him that the multiverse is cracking open with villains who know Peter is Spider-Man about to enter the MCU en masse.

If nobody even knows Peter Parker, let alone that he is Spider-Man, the world will be safe, but Strange warns him that the result "would be as though you never existed". Peter accepts the consequences and promises MJ and Ned that he'll return to them and make them remember him.

However, when he gets his chance to do so a few weeks later, Peter chooses not to and No Way Home ends with Peter on his own, anonymously going about his Spidey business without his girlfriend and best friend.

Despite this devastating ending, Spider-Man fans have been convinced that Peter and MJ will find a way to get back together. Whether it's in a potential Spider-Man 4 or later, MJ will remember who Peter is and they'll live happily ever after.

This was little more than fan fiction for a while, but now the official script has been released as part of the movie's awards campaign (via Deadline). One key description of Peter and MJ's final moment gives us hope that she hasn't completely forgotten him.

After Peter notices the Band-Aid above her eye (a result of an injury during the final battle), he chooses not to tell her about him. The pair share an awkward goodbye and MJ looks on while the stranger who bought a coffee and acted all weird leaves. But was there something more in the final beat?

"HOLD ON MJ, watching Peter go with a lingering sense of... recognition?," the script reads. While there is a question mark, this suggests that MJ does remember something about Peter or, at the very least, thought that he seemed awfully familiar.

Maybe all it will take is some more chance meetings between the two for everything to come flooding back. After all, she unwittingly has a reminder of Peter hanging around her neck in the form of the black dahlia necklace he bought her in Far From Home, so maybe Strange's spell isn't as concrete as he thought.

There have always been question marks over what Strange's spell actually did in the world, such as whether every photo of Peter been erased from existence as well. When MJ and Ned look at their snaps from that eventful summer trip around Europe, are there just blank spots where Peter should be?

The writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have said that they don't yet have all the answers, choosing to focus on the emotion of Peter choosing to be all alone at the end, rather than the specifics of it all.

"If people have questions about some of those details that didn't get answered here, we'll answer them hopefully in another movie somewhere down the line," Sommers noted, with McKenna adding: "Obviously, some sort of magical redaction has occurred. At the end of all this, we didn't want a lot of people trying to do magical math in their head."

That certainly leaves the door open for the spell to be reversed for specific characters such as MJ and Ned. Perhaps those school photos still have Peter in them, and it's something like that which jogs the memory and sets MJ to investigate who this nerdy kid is.

If Tom Holland does return as Spider-Man in the MCU, we'd be surprised if they kept Peter and MJ apart forever. So this little nugget from the official No Way Home script is all the hope we need that it's not just our fan fiction.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is out now in cinemas.

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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.