Marvel Studio’s Head of Visual Development Ryan Meinerding revealed the one mandate surrounding Spider-Man: No Way Home involving the Marvel Cinematic Universe debut of one of the wall-crawler’s greatest enemies, The Green Goblin.
In a passage from the Spider-Man: No Way Home-The Art of the Movie artbook, Meinerding recalled that since The Green Goblin is a character who had a “very iconic, heightened look” from 2002’s Spider-Man, the movie’s production team was “tasked with seeing how much of that [they] could keep while still making it feel like it existed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” He added, “Since a lot of the MCU is about technology, I think Adi Granov was the first one to try to add the hood. Everybody was doing such gorgeous work–Visual Development Concept Illustrator Phil Saunders did some hugely dynamic, amazing images of the Goblin on the glider about to throw pumpkins–and it was all aimed at essentially trying to ground the character a little bit more.”
Saunders himself chimed in that the team had considered having The Green Goblin get “access to a lot of MCU tech and being able to generate a new suit for himself,” along with different ideas of what it could be and mentioning that one such notion was the mandate of including his purple-and-green colors from the comics. Saunders concluded by saying the choice was made to “take the suit from the Raimi-verse and just MCU it up a bit,” further commenting, “A lot of the effort that I put in on the suit was in that direction, trying to make something that, at first glance, is clearly recognizable as the Raimi suit, but just has a little bit of an upgrade to today’s standards and expectations for Super Hero costume design and fabrication.”
Alternate Ideas for The Green Goblin
Besides this instruction, pieces of concept art shared in the book revealed that The Green Goblin was going to have his own Iron Man armor, the latter design of which had the purple-and-green colors instead of its predecessor’s red-and-green colors. Additionally, a different piece showed a fight between The Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus.
Regarding why The Green Goblin got a new costume in the film, returning actor Willem Dafoe shared his two cents on the topic in 2022, citing the criticisms geared towards the character’s mask. That being said, there is no official explaination from Marvel for Norman Osborn’s ensemble in No Way Home.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is available on Digital, Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD and DVD.
Source: Spider-Man: No Way Home-The Art of the Movie, via The Direct