What’s the next best thing to seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home? Reading Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’ script!
We say that not just because No Way Home is an excellent movie and has broken records left and right. (That’s a great reason to read it, though.) The script, which can be found at Deadline, also revealed something else: a small nod to Stan Lee.
Stan was beloved for many things, his cameos in Marvel films being one of them. Even after his passing, smart creatives found ways to pay homage to him. From Easter eggs in Venom: Let There Be Carnage to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy video game to Marvel’s What If? to WandaVision to Spider-Man: Miles Morales video game and more, it’s clear that Stan’s memory is alive and well in the Marvel universe.
This goes for Spider-Man: No Way Home, too. For one, the filmmakers dropped a Stan Easter egg, a taxi cab boasting the numbers ‘1228’ in honor of Stan’s December 28th birthday. But that wasn’t all that was planned. As the script reveals, late in the movie MJ (Zendaya) interacts with a “Stan Lee lookalike” in a donut shop. Indeed, in the scene we do see her talking to an older man sitting at the counter with shaggy white hair holding a coffee cup.
Though this doesn’t really resemble Stan Lee – actually, Syfy pointed out that it looks more like Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym – we can guess that’s what they were going for with that particular script description.
To us, the framing of that scene actually conjures another Stan Lee cameo, one not as well known to fans. Stan made a few appearances in his Japanese anime Heroman. Of those, one of the most recognizable ones – it’s even become a meme! – is below.
Granted, the only similarities that really stick out are the older man and the coffee cup, but it’s something! And now that we know from the script that the character at the counter in No Way Home was supposed to look like Stan, the wheels in our heads have been turning. Were the writers inspired by Stan’s cameo in Heroman? Have they even seen it? Or is it all just a coincidence? We don’t know, but it’s fun to speculate.