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'Who's your favourite Spider-Man?': Why the future of Spidey looks thwipping exciting

A brief history of everyone's favourite spider bite victim's adventures on the silver screen

The three versions of 21st century big- screen Spidey (l-r) Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland, all doing whatever a spider can. Images: Alamy / Illustration: Big Issue

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.

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.

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After plans for a fourth Raimi film fell apart, it was a sprint for Sony/Columbia to meet a contractual
stipulation struck in 1999: if they did not have a new Spider-Man movie in cinemas within five years and nine months of the previous movie, the film rights would revert to Marvel. 

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Which brings us to the Garfield era. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) lacked any new ideas, seemingly content to rehash an origin story. This was likely due to that spandex-tight deadline. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) followed promptly but again failed to make much of a case for its existence beyond the charming chemistry between Garfield’s gangly Peter and Emma Stone as his sweetheart Gwen Stacy. But in that one, they really nailed the costume: brighter colours and, crucially, big white eyes. 

Poor Garfield did not get to complete his trilogy. Instead the focus shifted on Sony cutting a deal with the ascendent Marvel Studios, who threaded the puckish Holland into the ensemble of Captain America: Civil War (2016) before giving him his own rather cheekily titled standalone film Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). 

If this was meant to signal Spider-Man belatedly coming home to Marvel, there remains a subtle corporate tug-of-war in the margins. Holland has appeared in six Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, but you will not find his standalone sequels Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019) and No Way Home (2021) on Disney+ in the Marvel section. 

But there are reasons to be optimistic. The climax of No Way Home returned Maguire and Garfield to their universes but also reset things for Holland’s Peter Parker. He has ditched the high-tech suit and cosmic battles and can go back to being a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. So while revisiting his greatest thwips from the past 22 years should be fun, the future for Spidey looks even more exciting.

Graeme Virtue is a film and TV critic. The weekly Spider-Man cinema rereleases begin 2 August and run until 20 September.

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