What is the fate of these characters in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)?

Question

I've been thinking a lot about the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home, trying to reconcile the MCU's time travel rules (covered during Endgame, and I don't like them) with the new Multiverse.

Anyway...super heavy spoilers for anyone who still hasn't watched it:

During the final battle the three Spider-Men lure the villains to the Statue of Liberty and one by one cure them and turn them back to normal, or even "good" so to say. All is done, Dr. Strange casts the spell, everybody forgets who Peter Parker really is and it's all good.

What I don't understand is...these villains were sent back to their universes to the point where they were about to die at the hands of their respective Spider-Man. Now they're "cured" and "good", so does that still happen? Do they still die? Do they still know who Spider-Man is? Does this create new universes where these villains turn good and don't die against Spider-Man? Maybe I missed something about Dr. Strange's explanation? (No matter what you do, they will die if/when we send them back).

What's the fate of these characters? Is it explained anywhere in the film or another work or interview?

Answer 1

The logic of the timeline rules established in Avengers: Endgame, Loki, and What If...? suggests that -- unlike in Back to the Future -- old timelines are never overwritten by new ones. Instead, any deviation from an existing timeline will create a new timeline branching off from the one it was spawned from.

We get a pretty clear example of this in the first episode of What If...?, when Peggy Carter makes a different choice than the one she made in Captain America: The First Avenger, and the Watcher indicates that this triggers the creation of a new universe.

THE WATCHER: Time. Space. Reality. It's more than a linear path. It's a prism of endless possibility, where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities, creating alternate worlds from the ones you know. I am the Watcher. I am your guide through these vast new realities. Follow me and ponder the question... "What if...?"

THE WATCHER: Earth, June, 1943. The Nazi army marches across Europe, leaving death and destruction. The Allied armies band together to create a new kind of soldier. A Super Soldier. At humanity's darkest hour, a skinny kid from Brooklyn became Captain America. After turning the tide of World War II, he made the ultimate sacrifice, restoring peace and saving this universe. But in another universe, a single choice created a whole new hero.

STEVE ROGERS: All this to make one Super Soldier.

PEGGY CARTER: Paris has fallen. London might be next. If this works, you could end the war. We mere mortals can only dream of doing such things.

DR. ABRAHAM ERSKINE: Agent Carter, wouldn't you be more comfortable in the booth?

PEGGY CARTER: No, I'd prefer to stay.

THE WATCHER: There. That's the moment that created a new universe. When asked to leave the room, Margaret "Peggy" Carter chose to stay. But soon it would be her venturing into the unknown and creating a new world.

_{What If...? - S01E01 - "What If... Captain Carter Were The First Avenger?"}

Following that logic, when the villains were sent back their original universes, it shouldn't in principle have erased the timelines we saw in the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films. Instead, new timelines should've been created, branching off from the existing ones.

In terms of the future history of those new timelines, that's very hard to predict, partly because we don't know whether the spell Dr. Strange cast to make everyone lose all memory of Peter Parker also applied to those other universes.

Either way though, it doesn't seem very likely that Norman Osborn and Max Dillon would still have died fighting their respective Spider-Men, since Osborn was cured of his evil Goblin persona, and Dillon lost his powers entirely.

Dr. Octopus might still have died, since he was apparently transported to the MCU shortly before he willingly sacrificed himself to save New York City, as shown in the scene below from near the end of Spider-Man 2 (2004). Assuming the cured Ock arrived back at the same moment he left, he'd probably still choose to make that sacrifice.

Answer 2

Tackling your lead up questions first, in reverse order, because this can give some clarity

Does this create new universes where these villains turn good and don't die against Spider-Man?

Reference Loki, which contributed some of the fundamental “rules” you might be lamenting. We learned in Loki why the sacred timeline branches; note I’ll replace “sacred timeline” with triggering timeline for sake of clarity since no sacred timeline exists anymore, but the nexus events can still happen.

Why would a new universe be created? Loki tells us it’s because of:

An unplanned decision or moment, known as a nexus event, triggered the creation of a branched timeline.

Speculating then, that had the villains planned their baby-face turn from heel due to events in No Way Home, then no nexus event would result — either in the MCU timeline or their original Sony-universe timeline. The world would simply move on without a nexus event. We might reasonably quibble about what is then “planned” versus “unplanned” upon the baby-faced former villains’ returns, but we can leave that up to their universe to decide such details. But if rules of Loki hold, then planned events create no nexus. I would simplify a possible complicating issue that this even holds with respect to actions planned as a villain that execute after the baby-face turn.

An example: Green Goblin’s death in Spider-Man (2002). If the newly good Goblin was returned to replace the evil Goblin after the Goblin summoned his glider but before it impaled him, and instead impaled Good Goblin, then I think Good Goblin might die without any nexus being created: Goblin planned the glider summoning. However, possibilities might also then exist that Spider-Man reacts in a new way, saving Good Goblin and/or possibly creating a nexus with branching universe. Contrast this with if Good Goblin was returned before evil Goblin summoned the glider; we could expect Good Goblin probably would choose not to summon the glider, point of which was to kill Spider-Man, and then he saves himself; Good Goblin lives, and no nexus event is created.

Do they still know who Spider-Man is?

Unequivocally no. Based on Strange’s description of the final spell in No Way Home, they may know and recognize Spider-Man; a super-hero in a red spider-webbed suit. But any and all association to Peter Parker is gone. Anyone who knew Parker was Spider-Man now has no idea of Parker. They may expect that Spider-Man is someone wearing the suit.

What is the fate of these characters?

Too soon to tell. It’s not explained anywhere. And we can expect future Sony films may decide to return to these characters’ post-NWH lives.

Answer 3

We don't know.

All we saw was the characters in question disappearing in a cloud of light. This means that they went back to their respective universes. However, I would say it's about future works to ask what happened to them. Perhaps they'll be seen in another multiverse crossover, such as the as-yet unreleased Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), but until then, we don't know what has happened to them.