On Day 67 of Spider-Man: Homecoming‘s 72-day shoot, Spider-Man is taking a nap on the Staten Island Ferry. That’s where Yahoo Movies first spies the new wall-crawler, Tom Holland, when we step aboard the moored ship serving as the Homecoming set one brisk September morning in New York last year. While director Jon Watts and various crew members bustle about preparing for the next shot, the web-head is sprawled on a wooden bench, his trademark red-and-blue suit partially covered by a robe that’s closer to Venom’s all-black ensemble. Faster than you can say “symbiote,” places are called and Holland bounds up from his spider nap, taking his spot in the frame and shadowboxing to get his blood pumping. “If it’s the first shot after a break, I like to do pushups or shadowbox,” the 20-year-old actor tells us later. “I do that to psych myself up. And obviously, he’s such a high-energy character. There’s nothing more boring than a dull Spider-Man.”

Spider-Man is going to need plenty of energy to survive this particular scene, which serves as Homecoming‘s centerpiece action sequence, as well as a major turning point in the life of the fledgling teen hero Peter Parker. As a sign of its importance to the narrative, the ferry sequence is heavily featured in the most recent Homecoming trailer, where we see precisely how Spider-Man’s greatest triumph instead turns into his biggest public failure. “It goes from bad to worse,” Holland admits in between shots. “Peter is still a kid — he’s a superhero that’s learning what he can do.”

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Parker’s childish enthusiasm is what lands him in this mess. Having spent the first half of the movie on the trail of Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a salvage company owner who has adopted the high-tech guise of the scavenging criminal the Vulture, the teen confronts his quarry’s gang aboard a Staten Island-bound ferry. Overconfident in his abilities and relying too heavily on the toys built into his Tony Stark-designed suit, Parker screws up his biggest solo supervillain brawl when a Vulture-caused explosion splits the boat in half. As the bad guys get away, Spider-Man stays behind, using his webbing to hold the ferry together. That’s when Iron Man shows up to bail Peter out … and read him the riot act. In the wake of that disaster, Stark demands his Spidey suit back, forcing his protégé to continue pursuing Toomes in decidedly low-tech clothing.

While they’re a big part of this sequence, and Parker’s life in general, there’s no sign of Toomes or Stark on the Homecoming set. Both Keaton and Robert Downey Jr. filmed all their scenes in Atlanta, where the crew constructed a full-scale facsimile of the distinctive orange ferry to shoot the bulk of the sequence. Now the production is using one of the actual ferries for pickup shots — filming under the fake title Summer of George — and Watts, for one, is thrilled by how closely the real thing resembles the replica. “Everything, down to the rivets, is the same,” he says. “It makes me feel very comfortable here.” Of course, real New Yorkers would notice the small ways this particular boat has been Marvel-ized. In place of ads touting real N.Y.C. tourist spots, there are posters hawking the 2018 Stark World Expo, as well as the Battle of New York Memorial Museum, which carries the tagline, “…Remember Always.”

View photos Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr., and Tom Holland in “Homecoming.” (Photo: Columbia Pictures) More

Those details are vivid reminders that Homecoming marks Spider-Man’s first solo outing within the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, after being introduced as a member of Team Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War. And Parker is still desperately eager to please his billionaire mentor, which makes his failure aboard the ferry all the more painful. “At this point in the story, Peter is at one of these crossroads where he should probably be asking for help,” explains co-producer Eric Hauserman Carroll. “But he’s so hell-bent on making a name for Spider-Man in a world populated with superheroes, he acts a little rashly here. It turns out okay, but only because he gets help from his friend Iron Man. And it’s not pretty.”