Cinepals Break Down the Reused Shots From The Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3 Hidden in No Way Home

We went into this one already suspicious. Watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, something about the way Sandman and Lizard interacted with Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker never quite computed for us, and a breakdown video of reused shots from The Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3 confirmed exactly why.

This matters for fans because it explains one of the stranger uncanny valley feelings from the movie. If you watched No Way Home and felt like certain villain scenes were slightly disconnected from everyone else on screen, we are here to tell you it was not just in your head.

The Sandman Scene Felt Like Vin Diesel Talking to Recycled Paul Walker Footage

The first thing we called out was the scene where Sandman turns back into a person and Tobey Maguire tells him "he'll be all right buddy" while Sandman just looks at his hands. It felt awkward, like the actors were not even reacting to each other. We compared it directly to Furious 7, where Vin Diesel gives Paul Walker some sage advice on a plane and Walker just smiles back instead of delivering one of his usual smart responses, because that footage was reportedly pulled from another Fast movie. Once the breakdown video started, we joked about how it was only 40 seconds long and wondered how anyone was going to stretch that into an eight minute video, before noting that eight minute video lengths exist because of a YouTube ad rule change, not because creators need ten minutes for mid roll placement.

The Amazing Spider-Man and No Way Home Share an Identical Andrew Garfield Shot

The breakdown then put a shot of Andrew Garfield from The Amazing Spider-Man side by side with a shot from No Way Home, and it was the same shot. We joked that maybe it was just a different camera angle, since sometimes actors get shot from multiple angles anyway. Then the punchline landed: it was the exact same footage of him looking at his hand, reused outright. "I told you," was the reaction, since the suspicion had already been there before the proof showed up on screen.

Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man 3 Footage Looks Cleaner Than It Should

We noticed something odd comparing the old Spider-Man 3 footage to how it appears in No Way Home. At first it looked like a really well done de-aging job on Maguire, until we realized it was not de-aging at all, it was just old footage that had still been cleaned up. The wrinkles are more visible on the Spider-Man 3 side than on the No Way Home side, which does not make sense if it is the same shot. We speculated it might be some kind of beauty filter applied during the compositing process, and questioned why they would not just leave the wrinkles in so it actually matched the Spider-Man 3 source material rather than smoothing it out.

Thomas Haden Church Reportedly Never Set Foot on the No Way Home Set

The Sandman question led somewhere concrete. We wondered aloud what Thomas Haden Church's actual involvement in the film was, since you never really see his unobscured face and it sounded like his voice was doing most of the work. As the breakdown video explained, citing visual effects supervisor Kelly Port in an interview with Before and Afters, Church made his contributions to the film without ever showing up on set. Port described two key moments, one where Sandman is more humanoid and talking, and one where he appears in the Sanctum, and said of Church's involvement: "we had his voice, we weren't able to get a lot of visuals on him but we were able to get his voice for sure and we got scans and textures and things like that." According to the breakdown, today's visual effects technology gave the team far more freedom to expand Sandman's final form than was possible back in Sam Raimi's 2007 Spider-Man 3, and the team reportedly made the most of that freedom while still relying on Church's vocal performance as the vital piece. We joked that for the biggest movie of 2021, it was strange he could not show up, and figured the visual effects team must have just told him not to bother since they could handle it in post, wires, C-stands, blue screen and all. We noted, only half joking, that the effects team did not manage to erase everything, since the film suffered plenty of leaks before release.

The Lizard Close-Up Was Reused From a Different Camera Angle

The same pattern showed up with Lizard. The breakdown paired an Amazing Spider-Man close-up with a No Way Home shot that is essentially the same performance, same teardrop, same wind in his hair, same expression, just shot from the side instead of head on. We guessed the tight version was likely the close-up from The Amazing Spider-Man while the wider profile angle used in No Way Home was probably a wider take from the same original shoot, repurposed for the new film. It struck us as unusual that they would build a scene around a side angle rather than the original close-up, but as far as the finished product goes, it worked.

Most Viewers Never Noticed, Which Is Exactly Why This Felt Satisfying

We pointed out that most audiences were probably none the wiser about any of this until videos like this one started circulating. Part of the reason is that press interviews around the film featured Willem Dafoe, Jamie Foxx and Alfred Molina, but not the actors behind Sandman or Lizard, so there was no red carpet moment to tip anyone off. That led to a brief tangent about Dafoe's own family reportedly disagreeing on how to pronounce his last name, and about a host's brother having once interviewed Rhys Ifans for Kingsman, with a joke about whether Spider-Man questions would even have been allowed in that setting. For us, the whole exercise was ultimately validating. Watching No Way Home the first time, something about those scenes did not compute, and this breakdown confirmed the overly analytical instinct was right all along.

Do you think it was cheaper for Marvel and Sony to reuse old Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire footage than to bring Thomas Haden Church back and de-age everyone from scratch?