No Way Home Screenwriters Explain Why a Character Had to Die

Editor’s note: The below article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.Aunt May’s belief in saving people no matter what may have been the driver for Tom Holland’s Spider-Man to save the villains before sending them back to their respective timelines; however, that drive to save other doomed May’s own life.

In an interview with Variety, Spider-Man: No Way Home’s screenwriter, Erik Sommers, explained in detail why Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) had to have a tragic death. “We were at the point where we felt like there needed to be a loss, a sacrifice, that Peter needed to pay a real price for this decision to try and save the villains,” Sommers said, adding, “I think it becomes pretty clear to a lot of us that losing Aunt May was the thing that would drive home the point we were trying to make: making this the movie where Peter Parker experiences the loss that the other ones did in their first movies.”

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For Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parkers, that devastating loss was the death of Uncle Ben. Unlike Holland’s Parker, which faced the loss of Aunt May because of the belief that she taught him, both Maguire and Garfield’s Peters loss their Uncle Bens due to shirking in the responsibility that he tried to instill in them both, which was: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

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In No Way Home, all of the Spidey-villains Peter was trying to save all escape, including the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). After he escapes, the Green Goblin kills Aunt May right in front of Peter, and as she’s dying, May utters Uncle Ben’s credo to Peter.

May’s death leaves Peter distraught, with him questioning the worth of being Spider-Man. However, he is encouraged by Ned (Jacob Batalon), MJ (Zendaya), and the two other Peter Parkers to fight in Aunt May’s honor, just as they had to find a way to fight Uncle Ben’s honor.