Highlights
- Spider-Man: No Way Home introduced Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin to the MCU, with Marvel Studios requesting a modernized design that still maintained the character’s iconic look.
- The design team aimed to bridge the character’s appearance from the original Raimi-verse with the contemporary standards and expectations for superhero costume design.
- Willem Dafoe’s performance as the Green Goblin was widely praised, making him one of the standout highlights of Spider-Man: No Way Home and potentially setting the stage for future appearances.
Spider-Man: No Way Home introduced Willem Dafoe’s Geen Goblin to the MCU. However, Marvel Studios had one major request for the design team in charge of bringing the character back to life.
Spider-Man: No Way Home was released in 2021 as the third chapter of Marvel Studios and Sony’s jointly-produced reboot series. After Spider-Man’s identity is revealed to the world, the wall-crawler enlists Doctor Strange’s help to fix the situation but accidentally fumbles and breaks open the multiverse. This gave the film license to bring back many characters from previous franchises, with Spider-Man: No Way Home storyboards revealing Micheal Keaton’s Vulture was also initially included.
While Keaton’s Vulture didn’t make it into the film, Dafoe made his MCU debut (and the day of every moviegoer), confirming rumors of Green Goblin’s return in Spider-Man: No Way Home. As reported by The Direct, the official Spider-Man: No Way Home: Art of the Movie artbook reveals that Marvel Studios had one major request for the character’s film appearance. “The Green Goblin is another character that had a very iconic, heightened look from the first film,” Marvel Studios Head of Visual Development Ryan Meinerding revealed. “We were tasked with seeing how much of that we could keep while still making it feel like it existed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe… There were thoughts about him getting access to a lot of MCU tech and being able to generate a new suit for himself. And there were different ideas of what that could be.”
Meinerding continued, walking fans through the thought process behind the changes. “Let’s take the suit from the Raimi-verse and just MCU it up a bit,” the supervisor explained. “In other words, what would that effective design be with the costume molding technology that we have today? A lot of the effort that I put in on the suit was in that direction, trying to make something that, at first glance, is clearly recognizable as the Raimi suit, but just has a little bit of an upgrade to today’s standards and expectations for Super Hero costume design and fabrication.” The upgrade was a success, with Dafoe and Alfred Molina’s performances leading many to conclude that No Way Home proved Sam Raimi’s trilogy had the best Spider-Man villains.
The effort was worth it, as Dafoe was seen by many as the highlight of Spider-Man: No Way Home, alongside other stellar performances. Since Dafoe admitted he’s open to returning to Marvel, there’s a chance that fans will again enjoy the effort that Meinerding and his contemporaries put into modernizing the Goblin design to go along with Dafoe’s timeless performance as the villain.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is available for streaming on HBO Max and Starz.
Source: The Direct
