It’s been in a bunch of the trailers for Homecoming, but apparently a lot—a lot—of work went into the simple moment that poor Ned Leeds, upon learning his best friend is Spider-Man, drops approximately 4,000 Lego bricks worth of Death Star all over the floor. Why? Because there wasn’t one Lego Death Star. There were seven.
Spidey himself, Tom Holland, revealed that factoid in a short new featurette posted to IGN’s instagram account, discussing the actor’s favorite prop from the film—which turned out not to be his Spider-suit or his webshooters or anything, but the massive Lego Death Star Peter and Ned build together, only to see it smashed into thousands of little pieces again.
According to Holland, the crew “only” had seven copies of the massive set, released late last year, which all ended up being used for the sequence because co-star Jacob Batalon kept accidentally dropping the set earlier than needed. This is understandable, because I can tell you from personal experience that carrying 4,000 lego bricks crafted into a dense, yet precarious sphere is really bloody hard.
Honestly, the thing that gets me the most out of this—other than the nightmarish horror of whoever had to build seven of these things watching each one be destroyed—is that, when I built this set, it took me 22 hours and almost drove me insane. I can’t imagine what doing seven would be like, even with a team of people working on it. I wouldn’t even be able to watch them get carried to the set after all that finger-numbing work, let alone watch them shatter into their constituent pieces again and again.