[Warning – This article contains mild spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming!]
Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) kissed Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) in the first batch of Spider-Man movies. And Peter (Andrew Garfield) kissed Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in The Amazing Spider-Man movies. But there's no kiss for Tom Holland's version of the character in Spider-Man: Homecoming. However, going against the grain wasn't part of the plan until the movie's post-production.
Laura Harrier, who portrays Liz Allan, told ComicBook that she and Holland had shot a number of kissing scenes for the July 7 release, but all of them were left behind in the editing room:
We did a lot of different kissing scenes, and none of them are in the movie now. I don’t know. It’s an interesting choice. We didn’t know what they were going to choose, because we had all these different options of Spider-Man kisses, and then there’s none.
If multiple kissing scenes were shot, it’s surprising that not even a single one made it into the theatrical cut, especially since we've seen a number of similar scenes in the previous Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. One such scene even showed up in the promotional videos. Why Marvel and Sony decided against including the scenes remains a mystery.
However, those intimate moments aren’t the only scenes from the trailers and commercials that were omitted from the Spider-Man: Homecoming final cut. Two more were cut: One with Michael The Vulture (Michael Keaton) descending through a hotel atrium, and one with Holland's webslinger and Robert Downey, Jr.'s Iron Man flying around New York City. Director Jon Watts explained what happened with the missing shots during a recent interview with ScreenCrush:
The hotel atrium shot was originally created for Comic-Con, for like a sizzle reel, before we had really shot anything; we had shot like two weeks of footage or something. That was never meant to be in the movie. But I did use that angle for Vulture's reveal at the beginning of the movie; Vulture's hovering, swooping towards the camera like that. I used that shot, it's just no longer in an Atlanta hotel atrium.
[In regard to the shot with Iron Man and Spider-Man,] I think what happened was that in the very first trailer, they wanted a shot of Spider-Man and Iron Man flying together. And they were going to use something from the Staten Island Ferry [scene], but it just didn't look that great – the background plate, because the Staten Island terminal is a very simple building. It almost looks like an unrendered 3D object. So I think I was like, "Let's just put them in Queens. Let's use that as a backdrop." Because we couldn't just create a whole new shot, so let's just use one of these shots of the subway; put them in there.
Watts admitted that he felt "a little weird" that those scenes were in the trailers but not in the movie, although he didn't necessarily have a guilty conscience about it. To be honest, there's no need to. Recent movies, including David Ayer's Suicide Squad and Gareth Edwards' Rogue One, had far more scenes that were excluded from the theatrical cuts after showing up in trailers. This is actually a pretty common occurrence these days.
