LogFAQs > #961718513

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/spider-man-no-way-home-spoilers-tobey-maguire-andrew-garfield-aunt-may-1235144617/

Mays death was a step in the filmmakers mission to strip everything away from Hollands Peter and leave him, by the end of No Way Home, much closer to his true comic book origins: a scrappy kid with almost no resources beyond his intellect and superhuman abilities. That culminates with his decision to repair the widening rift in the multiverse by having Strange cast a spell that makes everyone, everywhere forget him as Peter Parker.

Since Hollands Peter still exists in the MCU, his decision has a litany of wide-ranging and persnickety problems attached to it: Does this mean all records of him are gone too? Does he still have a social security number? Are the photos of MJ and Ned gone from his phone? And so on.

Asked about these questions, McKenna and Sommers grimace.

This is the first time that weve ever discussed this, Sommers deadpans.

In truth, the filmmaking team talked at length about the implications of the anti-Peter spell and how the movie could address them. We were like, do we do a Back to the Future kind of thing where you see him fading out of photos? Sommers says. Does he still have a drivers license or a passport? It just led to more questions.

So they punted. We decided, lets try to do it in the most satisfying way and just focus on the emotion of it, Sommers says. And then if people have questions about some of those details that didnt get answered here, well answer them hopefully in another movie somewhere down the line.

Obviously, some sort of magical redaction has occurred, McKenna adds. At the end of all this, we didnt want a lot of people trying to do magical math in their head.

Pascal suggested looking to the 1978 Warren Beatty comedy Heaven Can Wait for a solution. People had these experiences, but they start forgetting the person they knew, but they were still affected by the events that happened, McKenna explained.

Besides, it was more important to have the scene where Hollands Peter encounters MJ while shes working in her doughnut shop and decides to not try to win her back. You want to have that doughnut scene be him making the last piece of the sacrifice, McKenna says, adopting Peters inner-monologue: I could tell them everything. I can try to get my friends back. But Id be going right back to the place of endangering my loved ones by bringing them into my life. And I cant have that.

Sounds like this will be addressed in future movies, but the plan was for the spell to do a bunch of reality warping, not just memory wipe. All photos, records, anything relating to Peter Parker's existence is erased.