Tom Holland's 'Umbrella' lip sync battle was so powerful it controlled the weather
New Spider-Man superpower: He controls the weather?
As the start of the MTV Movie & TV Awards was counting down Sunday, a special episode of Lip Sync Battle aired on the network, pitting Spider Man: Homecoming stars Tom Holland and Zendaya against one another.
The competition was neck-and-neck until Holland threw down this version of Rihanna's "Umbrella," complete with a special effect that you had to see for yourself to believe:
Alas, it's not in the video, whose dancing and acrobatics themselves are Spidey-level amazing (not a huge surprise, if you know that Holland was trained at the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology, studied hip-hop dance and starred in Billy Elliot the Musical. Kid's legit got moves).
No, what was truly next-level about this particular performance is that at the very moment it aired on MTV (with a brief Singin' in the Rain intro), the skies opened up in real life in Los Angeles, with a concentrated downpour near the Shrine Auditorium where the awards were taking place.
And it couldn't have been timed better. Sunday's spring SoCal sprinkles turned to full-on raindrops as the intro started, and by the time Holland went into full Rihanna mode -- complete with fake rain falling on the Battle stage, which you can see below -- it started pouring in central LA in real life, complete with lightning and thunder crashing as the performance peaked on TV.
When it was over, so was the deluge going on outside. (Which makes us think that Zendaya, who plays "Michelle" in Homecoming, might secretly be Storm from X-Men. Fan-theory on that.)
OK, OK, that's ridiculous. And the battle was taped, of course, so the powerful fourth-dimension effect was probably nothing but a coincidence. Or was it?
This much is clear: With great power comes great special effects.
Topics Marvel
Josh Dickey is Mashable's Entertainment Editor, leading Mashable's TV, music, gaming and sports reporters as well as writing movie features and reviews.Josh has been the Film Editor at Variety, Entertainment Editor at The Associated Press and Managing Editor at TheWrap.com.A finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club's Best Entertainment Feature in 2015 for "Everyone is Altered: The Secret Hollywood Procedure that Fooled Us for Years," Josh received his BA in Journalism from The University of Minnesota.In between screenings, he can be found skating longboards, shredding guitar and wandering the streets of his beloved downtown Los Angeles.
