No Way Home Multiverse Easter Egg Hints At 4th Spider-Man Variant

A somewhat hidden Easter egg in Spider-Man: No Way Home could be hinting at a fourth Spider-Man variant in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s multiverse. Marvel is doing things differently in its Phase 4 as it’s now covering both TV shows and movies and exploring new characters, events, and concepts, and the main one so far is the multiverse. This was explored in the TV series Loki, which also introduced the concept of variants, and all of this was explored deeper in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The third Spider-Man movie in the MCU picks up minutes after the ending of Spider-Man: Far From Home, where Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) framed the young hero for his death and revealed his identity. In an effort to keep the ones he loves safe, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asks Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) for help and he casts a spell to make everyone forget Peter is Spider-Man, but the spell doesn’t go as planned. Instead, the spell opens the gates of the multiverse and allows villains from past Spider-Man movies to cross over to the MCU, as are the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Lizard, and Electro, but it also brings together the three big-screen Spider-Men for the first time.

After months of rumors about the arrival of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s versions of Spider-Man to the MCU, No Way Home made it possible through the multiverse chaos Strange and Peter provoked. Peter-Two (Maguire) and Peter-Three (Garfield) joined Holland’s Spider-Man to stop the aforementioned villains and take them back to their respective timelines, and it was established that Peter-Two and Peter-Three are variants of the MCU’s Spider-Man. Of course, given the endless amount of timelines in the multiverse, these aren’t the only Spider-Man variants in the MCU, and an Easter egg in No Way Home might have hinted at an obscure 4th Spider-Man variant: the Six-Armed Spider-Man.

As pointed out by Vudu, in the third act of No Way Home, when Doctor Strange realizes that the fabric of space and time is cracking and enemies from other timelines are starting to cross over, the camera shows the silhouettes of some of these characters. The most noticeable one is Kraven the Hunter, and to his left is Scorpion, but to his right is a curious silhouette of a person with six arms. This might be the Six-Armed Spider-Man from the Six Arms Saga, the story arc which saw the origin story of Morbius. In it, in an effort to get rid of his spider powers after a series of traumatic events, Peter takes the serum he had been working on, but it has the opposite effect and it increases his spider powers and makes him grow four extra arms. In Ultimate Marvel’s version of Clone Saga, a Spider-Man clone has six arms and wears a black costume, but this version has more spider-like physical features.

The silhouette with multiple arms is very easy to miss in Spider-Man: No Way Home given everything that happens in that same scene and how fast these silhouettes disappear, and while it would make sense for another variant of Spider-Man to show up as the multiverse cracks, it seems a bit out of place. The characters shown in that scene are enemies of Spider-Man, and the Six-Armed version wasn’t an evil one – however, given that this variant made its debut in the same storyline as Morbius, it could hint at Morbius’ timeline in the multiverse having this version of Spider-Man. There’s still a lot to learn about the MCU’s multiverse and its many dangers, and variants make anything possible within it.