If you’ve seen any of the Spider-Man No Way Home trailers then you’re bound to have seen the the box that Peter and Doctor Strange are going to be wrestling over. However, with no specific references to it in any of the trailers, you might be wondering what it is, so here’s our in-depth trailer analysis to try to give you some of the possible solutions to the cube conundrum.
The box can be seen in all of the trailers, going all the way back to the teaser, which landed back in August, giving us our first big glimpse of what to expect from No Way Home. In fact, it’s clear that the mystical cube is going to be incredibly important to the plot, because it’s featured in the thumbnail for the YouTube video of the trailer with Doctor Stranger pushing Peter Parker’s spirit outside of Spider-Man, while he’s holding onto the box.
AdvertisementHowever, it is only in that scene that you see it in the teaser. It was then followed by the official trailer mid way through November where it was featured a whole lot more. It comes a little before the 2 minute mark and you can see Peter snatching the box from Doctor Strange, who gives chase before catching up with him in his Spider-Man suit before pushing his spirit outside of his body.
Our lead theory about the box
We’re going straight for the Pandora’s sweet spot on this one, because there seems to be one big possible answer to the “what it the box?” question. Doctor Strange clearly wants to get rid of the dimensional invaders, irrespective of the fact that they are about to die in their own universe. Peter wants to prevent this, so it’s logical that the mystical cube relates to this somehow.
AdvertisementWe’ll get onto what might be inside the box a little later, but the overview for our theory is that it can be used to influence the multiverse. Stephen wants to use it to send all of the inter-dimensional travelers back to their reality, where they will immediately die, and Peter is being the general neighbourhood Spider-Man on a multiverse scale and want to do what he can to save them.
We can see from the official trailer that Doc Oc has been captured and is being held inside the Sanctum Sanctorum and appears to have let slip that all of the new “villains” are ghosts from another reality. Stephen then confirms and it’s at this point that Spider-Man initiates spider pinch move to run away with the box.
AdvertisementYou can then hear him saying that there has to be another way – i.e. other than sending them back to their deaths – to which Stranger says “there isn’t”. Peter seems to want to do everything in his powers to protect the visitors and says “there has to be” and you can read more about why he might want to save them in the section below.
The box is then only seen one more time in the official trailer, but it’s probably the most important potential confirmation for our theory about what it is. You can see Spider-Man jumping off the top of the statue of Liberty with it and crucially this appears to be a later and very different section of the film to the one where the two heroes are tussling over it.
If we had to guess, we’d say that this is close to the end of the film where there’s a big confrontation featuring Electro, Sandman, Lizard and Green Goblin. You can see Doctor Strange later in the trailer in the same location saying that they’re starting to come through and he can’t stop them.
If the box is still important at this stage, it must be key to the dimensional tears you can see around the Statue of Liberty and by this stage it might even be too late to use it to repair them. Maybe there way a timescale where it could have been used to send everything back and put things right, but with all of the squabbling and fighting villains they’ve got to the point of no return.
We already know that Stephen will be facing multiple dimensions in his upcoming film, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so it’s possible that the film will finish on an unresolved note. Saving things just enough to allow Peter Parker and MJ to get back to their lives at least a little and leaving him with the mammoth job of restoring the multiverse tears.
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Why might Spider-Man want to save the No Way Home Villains
The reality is that there’s a certain amount of ambiguity about the villainy of the characters that cross over from Sam Raimi’s trio and the Amazing duo. Sandman was just trying to save his daughter, Kurt Conners got twisted by his scientific experiment, and it’s a similar story for Doc Oc, Electro and Green Goblin to a lesser or greater extent.
AdvertisementThe MCU Peter Parker’s big heart means that if there’s a chance to save them then he’s going to take it, because he wouldn’t be able to simply send them back to their insta-deaths, which appears to be Doctor Strange’s plan with all of the Scooby Doo business. It’s also possible that Otto shows some signs of contrition while incarcerated in the Sanctum, which could make Peter even more sympathetic to his cause.
What’s inside the box?
For us, the obvious answer is that it has to be the twisted and tangled remnants of the spell that Strange tried to cast to make everyone forget Peter is Spider-Man. The logical assumption is that the spell manipulated realities to switch things around between different universes, but when it was interrupted it jumbled things up to bring all of the No Way Home villains to the MCU.
You can see when the spell goes wrong that it condenses down to a small mass of magical rings circling each other. If Stephen wanted to reverse his multiverse manipulation efforts then it stands to reason that he’d need this to put things right, so uses the box to contain the leftovers from the initial spell.
The spell looks a lot like the energy wave that is expanding out from the Statue of Liberty around the same time that Strange talks about them coming through. This could well be the point of no return as the knotted botched spell activates, bringing various elements from the different dimensions into the MCU.
You’ll notice that all of the multiverse crossover is Spider-Man related, so it’s all tied to the spell, which we think Stephen boxed up with a plan to reverse it somehow. If you look at it from this point of view, the box is a spell container that keeps it from spinning out of control until he can work out a way to unpick it and send everything back. If the box gets broken in the final confrontation that everything goes wrong.
What else could the box be?
If we’re honest, we don’t really have a better alternative to the theory above. Maybe it’s a locking mechanism keeping Doc Oc in his cell, or some new mystical item that can be used to manipulate time and space, but neither of these work as well as the spell container concept.
AdvertisementIf it’s just a key to the locks under Sanctum Sanctorum then why do we see the box in the final confrontation with Electro, Green Goblin, Lizard and Sandman. It’s possible that Doctor Strange uses the box to contain the anomalies, so need it to contain them, but that doesn’t explain the expanding spell sequence and the point about more things crossing over.
If it’s a mystical item that can manipulate time and space then why hasn’t Stephen used it before in the battle against Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame? You could argue that he’s only just discovered it, but this seems a little on the weak side and again doesn’t explain the final confrontation crossovers.
The good news is that we don’t have that long to wait for Spider-Man No Way Home to arrive on the big screen, so we’ll update things once we’ve got the film under our belt. You can also check out our movie news section to keep tabs on the latest upcoming films, or visit the Universal Pictures website at https://www.sonypictures.com/.
