(WARNING: This post holds spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.)
Avengers: Endgame made a point of including several payoffs for those fans who’ve kept showing up to the multiplex for a decade. That would include Captain America going to town with Mjölnir during the final battle against Thanos, thereby proving that Steve Rogers is worthy of possessing Thor’s power (a question that went all the way back to Age of Ultron). During that same scene, the female superheros of the MCU all flank Captain Marvel as she carries the gauntlet. It was an enormously powerful display, but as it turns out, one actor in this sequence wasn’t actually present while they shot it.
That would be Tom Holland, who handed the gauntlet off to Carol Danvers after hugging it protectively and nervously introducing himself as Peter Parker. As WETA Digital visual effects supervisor Matt Aiken told CinemaBlend, they pulled off some digital wizardry to kick start his portion of the sequence:
“The only person who wasn’t able to be there on that day was Tom Holland, and Spidey has to hand the Gauntlet off to Captain Marvel at the start of that shot, so we had a stand-in for Spidey and we ended up filming him with a kind of faux-motion control rig a couple of weeks later when Tom Holland became available, and we tracked him into that shot and popped him in.”
Well, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it’s notable how seamlessly the visual effects team managed to integrate him into the sequence. And to be perfectly blunt, Tom Holland may not have been aware at all of the sequence that followed his dialogue and hand off of the gauntlet. The dude, after all, remains one of the most notorious (although inadvertent) spoilers of the MCU. Mostly, this is cool nerd trivia about how a key scene (one that will probably one day be referred to as iconic) was shot, despite everything not lining up perfectly in production. And that’s why they call it movie magic.
(Via CinemaBlend)