Why Didn't We See Scorpion In Spider-Man: No Way Home?
Warning: contains spoilers ahead for "Spider-Man: No Way Home"
Despite having a basement full of scaly, sandy, deranged villains in "Spider-Man: No Way Home," this is no Sinister Six — the frightening team-up of Spider-Man's enemies featured heavily in the comics. Each of the five villains has been plucked from their home universe — a pre-MCU "Spider-Man" film — and plopped right in the world of Tom Holland's Peter Parker. Instead of teaming up to take down their common foe, the villains tentatively agree to Peter's plan to cure them. Then things go terribly wrong, of course.
But even after "Spider-Man: Homecoming" teases the impending problem of the classic Spidey villain Scorpion, he doesn't appear in "No Way Home." In the first film, he never comes out swinging with his stinger tail, but instead is still the human Mac Gargan (Michael Mando), intent on buying alien weaponry from Adrian Toomes, aka Vulture (Michael Keaton). However, the deal never goes through because Spider-Man interrupts it on the ferry, and Gargan is arrested.
A lot has happened since then — Thanos, the Blip, Mysterio — so where's Scorpion, and why wasn't he in "No Way Home?"
It wasn't the time for Scorpion, but it could be soon
The last we see of Scorpion is in a post-credits scene of "Homecoming," when he encounters Toomes in prison with his scorpion neck tattoo on full display. He says he has friends that will kill Spider-Man, and he wants to know the superhero's identity, but Toomes doesn't give it to him.
We assume Mac learns Spider-Man's identity thanks to the post-credits scene of "Far From Home" but his memory would have been washed by the end of "No Wa Home." We don't know what he's doing during "No Way Home" — he might still be in prison, unable to get out and go after Peter. He most likely doesn't make an appearance in the movie simply because the Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures creatives decided to have the flick focus on villains from previous films.
However, since there will be more solo flicks for Tom Holland's Spidey, we could see Mac Gargan truly become Scorpion in the future. Luckily for Peter, no one knows his identity anymore.