Spider-Man: No Way Home Cut One Powerful Villain's Original Design - Here's Why

To cap off the Tom Holland-led "Spider-Man" trilogy, director Jon Watts and the minds at Marvel Studios cooked up the Spidey movie of all Spidey movies. "Spider-Man: No Way Home" sees the three main live-action versions of the title hero — Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Holland — combat a group of foes made famous in previous "Spider-Man" movies. Among these multiversal villains is Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), better known as the Lizard, who looks almost exactly like he does in 2012's "The Amazing Spider-Man."

Appropriately, Connors appears in "No Way Home" as a massive green lizard person with a gaping mouth and long tail. While this sounds like the proper list of visual beats needed to adapt the Marvel Comics staple correctly, the character could've been even more comic-accurate, according to Marvel Studios Head of Visual Development Ryan Meinerding. He revealed in "Spider-Man: No Way Home – The Art Of The Movie" that early designs featured torn-up shirts, pants, and labcoats to better match the print version of the Lizard fans have come to know.

However, Meinerding and his team ultimately stuck closer to Dr. Connors' "Amazing Spider-Man" design. He explained, "We're looking to pull a character from another film and have this audience believe it's that same character. If we change it too much, if we're changing bone structure, it doesn't feel like it's the character from that other movie, and we've lost the magic of the Multiverse." This makes sense on paper, but within the context of the film, it couldn't have been that hard to rationalize a tweaked Lizard design.

Ryan Meinerding's logic regarding Lizard's "Spider-Man: No Way Home" design is mostly sound. Changing the look of the character too much could confuse the audience, making it harder for fans to connect this take on Dr. Connors to the "Amazing Spider-Man" version. At the same time, it stands to reason fans would've made the connection even with some alterations to his attire and bone structure. Not only does the presence of his universe's Spider-Man — portrayed by Andrew Garfield — drive the point home that we've met this Lizard already, but the events of "The Amazing Spider-Man" are touched on in the film itself by the characters.

Not to mention, "No Way Home" isn't against giving characters different designs than the ones they sport in their previous movies. Most notable is Lizard's fellow "Amazing Spider-Man" series antagonist, Electro (Jamie Foxx). Instead of appearing as his blue-skinned, tech suit-wearing self from "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," he gets a total overhaul. He looks like a normal person wearing street clothes, just with yellow electricity flowing from his limbs and surging across his face in a comic-accurate fashion. It's explained as a byproduct of his reacting to the energy of another universe, but it's still a massive visual leap for viewers to follow. A physical appearance and clothing change could have been similarly explained for Lizard.

Overall, "Spider-Man: No Way Home" is nostalgic fun that reads as a love letter to the web-slinger's cinematic legacy. It's too bad a more comic-accurate Lizard doesn't feature within it.