On Monday, a story made the rounds that your new Spider-Man, Tom Holland, has confirmed that Peter Parker has been retconned into the MCU as the little boy that Iron Man saves during the Stark Expo in Iron Man 2. Now, this is obviously the team involved with Spider-Man: Homecoming having some fun with the past movies and incorporating their characters into it — because, frankly, why not? The same thing happens with Michael Keaton’s Vulture character, as he’s in charge on cleaning up the rubble caused by the final battle in The Avengers. When he unexpectedly loses that contract, he has to turn to a life of crime.
On Sunday, I spoke to Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts who explains how something like this happens. Basically, he’s just watching the old movies as a fan. Then he comes up with some fan fiction. Then, because he’s the director of a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, that fan fiction becomes a reality.
In the full interview that will run later this week, Watts and I were joking about what happened to Uncle Ben because Ben is not specifically mentioned in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Watts then replied, “You make the joke about that, but basically when I rewatched all the Marvel movies, I was watching them like that.” Watts continued, “I was watching all these other movies and being like, ‘What if that little kid at the Stark Expo was Peter Parker? In the Iron Man mask.’ Like, he’d be about the right age for that. And he loves Tony Stark. ‘Oh, what about after the Avengers battle, who would clean that stuff up?’ Because they mention damage control at one point in the movie. So it’s this thing where, because it’s not completely figured out, that you can just go back and basically write fan fiction for those movies, then the fan fiction becomes reality. A lot of the Easter eggs in this movie just started by rewatching the movies.”
I then asked Watts if a future movie would officially retcon Peter’s appearance in Iron Man 2, as opposed to just talking about it.
“I mean, I remember watching that with Kevin Feige and everyone and being like, ‘Does the math work on that?’ He was like, ‘It might, maybe.’ Then I found out that was Jon Favreau’s kid.”
So there you go: if this holds up, Peter Parker’s first appearance in the MCU was played by Max Favreau.
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