Here’s a Peter Parker poser: who is your favourite Spider-Man actor? With apologies to Nicholas Hammond, who gamely pulled on the red-and-blue tights in the short-lived 1970s TV show, it is probably one of the more recent big-screen Spideys. So Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire or maybe even Andrew Garfield.
If those three web-slingers stretching back to Spider-Man in 2002 seem surprisingly fresh in the mind, it is probably because they all appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home in late 2021 thanks to multiverse shenanigans. The result of that Spideypalooza team-up made just under $2bn at the global box office at a time when Covid still felt like a genuinely existential threat for cinema.
- Can Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse save us from multiverse fatigue?
- How Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 video game perfectly exemplifies UK’s housing crisis
There was lots going on in No Way Home, with university application stress, malfunctioning magic spells and a murderer’s row of villains plucked from previous eras. But as well as smashing down narrative barriers between different Spider-Man films it also broke the fourth wall. Holland and Maguire took time out to reassure the downcast Garfield that he was not a lame Spidey compared to them. (Like a self-help guru, Maguire suggested his Parker brother internalise a mantra: “You. Are. Amazing.”)
This exchange felt like a direct response to the prevailing wisdom that the two 2010s Spider-Man films headlined by Garfield were total duffers, even coming after the buzzkill of Maguire’s Spider-Man 3 in 2007. So over a decade on, is it time to reassess? Do those mid-period Spider-Man movies remain ‘mid’? We can find out together, as later this summer all eight films are being rereleased in UK cinemas on a weekly schedule. Notionally it is part of the centenary celebrations for Columbia Pictures, who have had a guiding hand on the Spidey tiller since they salvaged the film rights from a bankruptcy muddle in 1998.
Spider-Man (2002) and its rapid- fire sequel Spider-Man 2 (2004) remain genuine marvels of blockbuster filmmaking. Despite his hinterland in horror, director and co-writer Sam Raimi seemed to intuit that Spidey and his New York milieu needed to be bright, poppy and bouncy: the complete opposite of Tim Burton’s gloomy but world-conquering Batman (1989).
If Raimi pushed things too far with the overstuffed Spider-Man 3 (2007) – gritty thug Sandman, a revived Green Goblin and weird black alien goo all tussled for screen time – that film now has its defenders. But it has also been eclipsed by the recent Venom spin-offs. Turns out weird black alien goo is much more fun when Tom Hardy is doing a deranged ventriloquist act with it.
