All the Spider-Man films tend to feature the same elements over and over again.
While a lot of it's worked well for the character for about 60 years, you could go to the theater
and play Spidey-Bingo pretty easily.
Here are things that we see in every single Spider-Man movie.
Let's start with a gimme here: if you have a nephew or niece, and you find out they've
been bitten by a radioactive spider and developed fantastic abilities like sticking to walls
or super strength, pack your bags and get out of town as fast as you can.
Otherwise, you're headed for disaster.
Admittedly, the death of his uncle is the most important part of Spider-Man's origin
story, but still.
Watching an old man get shot starts to lose its impact when you've seen it over and over,
which is especially problematic in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy.
We get Uncle Ben's murder happening in the first film, a flashback and tons of references
to it in Spider-Man 2, and a completely different version of it that involves the sad-sack movie
version of the Sandman making up a huge chunk of the plot of Spider-Man 3.
"Remember Ben Parker?
The old man you shot down in cold blood?!"
It should probably be noted that this particular brand of tragedy isn't limited to Ben.
In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales watches as his own uncle is killed
in front of him.
As for the MCU, those movies have managed to avoid even a mention of the late Ben Parker
so far, with only a couple of oblique references to Peter's defining tragedy.
Far From Home, however, is going to take place in the aftermath of Tony Stark's death.
He's not Peter's uncle by relation, but he's definitely served as a father figure.
And if ever there was someone in Peter's life who fit the "weird uncle" archetype, it's
that guy.
"Hey May!
How you doing?
What are you wearing?
Something skimpy, I hope."
One of the most interesting choices in Spider-Man's design is that he's one of the few American
superheroes whose costume leaves him completely covered from head to toe.
His mask doesn't even have a mouth, just a pair of big opaque eyes.
This works pretty well in comics, but in movies, where actors use their faces to, you know,
act, it presents a bit of a problem.
That's probably why the Spider-Man we see in the movie theater seems like he'll do whatever
he can to get out of that mask, regardless of how it impacts his secret identity.
Again, the Raimi trilogy is the biggest offender in this regard.
Not only does Peter's mask get shredded by villains with a frequency that makes you wonder
just how many spares he has laying around, he'll occasionally just whip the whole thing
off.
Sure, it's a lot easier to tell a character's struggling when you can see their face, but
eventually, people are going to wonder why that kid who's always taking pictures of Spider-Man
never seems to catch him without his mask on.
"...We won't tell nobody."
Along the same lines, Homecoming features a recreation of the famous comic book scene
where Spidey fights his way out from underneath tons of rubble.
In the comic, the mask stays on, but on the big screen, Tom Holland's Spidey takes his
mask off to get some fresh air and keeps it off so that we can see him powering through
his superheroic feat of strength.
Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker shows off his face in Amazing Spider-Man to help calm down
a boy who's in danger.
It even extends to animated acting in Into the Spider-Verse, where Spidey loses his mask
just before he's killed by the Kingpin, and Peter B. spends most of the movie unmasked…and
in sweatpants.
There are very few things that superhero movies love as much as a good old-fashioned dose
of crucifixion imagery.
You might recall the scene in Man of Steel, for instance, where our hero's ghostly space
father tells the son he sent to Earth that he can "save" everyone, prompting Superman
to stick his arms out and start hovering in a pose that's pretty familiar to anyone who's
ever been inside a church.
While that's the least subtle example of this trope, Spider-Man's movies have even more
of it in action.
That's probably to be expected in a story of great power and great responsibility, but
once you start noticing it, you'll find it happens a lot.
Spidey stopping the train in Spider-Man 2 is the most obvious instance, but when Peter
tries to hold the ferry together in Homecoming, we get the same thing in a pretty similar
shot.
Spider-Man 3 even has an entire sequence that takes place in a church, finally adding parasitic
alien symbiotes to classic Biblical imagery.
Into the Spider-Verse actually manages to parody the movies' cruci-fixation twice in
the first two minutes, including a shot showing us Spidey bathed in rays of sunlight that
give him just a tiny bit of a halo.
One of the most compelling parts of Spider-Man's story is the impact that his superheroic career
has on his soap opera of a love life.
It's the source of endless drama, and it usually gets pretty complicated.
The same goes for the movies, every single Spider-Man film has a love story right there
at the core of its plot, with all the twists and turns that you'd expect.
In the Raimi films, it was Peter's on-again, off-again relationship with Mary Jane Watson,
which starts out complicated and only gets more tangled as the films continue, especially
when Gwen Stacy shows up in Spider-Man 3.
In Amazing Spider-Man, Gwen was free of a love triangle, but that relationship had no
shortage of speed bumps.
In the first film, Gwen's dad wanted to arrest Spider-Man for his vigilante activity...
"I think he stands for what you stand for, sir.
Protecting innocent people from bad guys."
"I stand for law and order, son.
That’s what I stand for.
I wear a badge.
This guy wears a mask."
...and in the second, a series of spats wound up leading to Gwen's tragic death.
Homecoming threw a different kind of wrench into the gears with Peter's crush on classmate
Liz.
Not only did he have to deal with constantly letting his friends down due to his arachnid
activities, he also had to contend with the reveal that her dad was a supervillain, who
figured out Peter was Spider-Man literally ten minutes after meeting him.
"...Good old Spider-Man."
Into the Spider-Verse complicates matters further thanks to its dimension-hopping plot.
We've got a Peter Parker who's dealing with a divorce from Mary Jane, with whom he's clearly
still in love, and a different Mary Jane who's dealing with the death of her world's Peter
Parker.
And those are just the minor characters The main romantic tension in that movie is between
two people from different realities.
That's a tough one.
There's long distance relationships, and then there's "my girlfriend?
You don't know her, she lives on Earth-65."
Spider-Man's roster of enemies is packed with characters who are actually pretty sympathetic.
Unlike, say, murderous clowns that only want to watch the world burn, supervillains like
the Lizard and the Sandman have motivations that we can relate to, and come with a heaping
helping of pathos that the movies are more than willing to bring to the screen.
The Green Goblin in Spider-Man is the outlier here, since it's pretty hard to be sympathetic
when you're pumpkin-bombing an old lady's bedroom while she's saying her bedtime prayers.
"Deliver us…"
"Finish it!
Finish it!"
"...from evil!"
Then again, even he has that scene where Norman Osborn is being tormented by his own alternate
personality.
Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 is shown to be a pretty decent guy before he's driven to multi-armed
criminal insanity, and in Amazing Spider-Man, Curt Connors, the Lizard. just wants to regrow
his lost arm.
The Vulture in Homecoming is maybe the least sympathetic guy of the bunch.
"I'll kill you and everybody you love."
For all his talk about sticking up for the little guy, Adrian Toomes drives a Jaguar
and owns a massive house in New York City, bought and paid for with the profits from
his high-tech arms dealing business.
But still, his stated motivation of wanting to take care of his family is hard to argue
with, and if nothing else, he keeps Peter's identity a secret rather than seeking revenge.
Into the Spider-Verse goes the furthest with this.
Not only do we see the Prowler as a regular guy hanging out with his favorite nephew,
but even the Kingpin has a shred of sympathy in there.
Yes, he kills Spider-Man with his bare hands and had a plan that might've destroyed all
of reality, but it all comes from his desire to see his wife and son again.
Their methods are bad, but their desires are very human, and pretty far from world domination.
In his first appearance, Spider-Man didn't start out with his familiar Spider-Suit.
Instead, his first outing after getting powers was in a pretty terrible homemade ensemble,
and that's an idea that the movies have kept around.
There's always a bad costume first.
In Spider-Man, it was a recreation of a scene from the original comic where he fought a
pro wrestler while wearing a sweatsuit and ski mask tricked out with a stenciled spider
on the chest.
In Amazing Spider-Man, it was a red mask with dark wraparound shades.
The MCU actually flipped the script a little by starting Peter off, at least as far as
the audience is concerned, in a comics-accurate version of his famous red-and-blue suit, provided
by Tony Stark.
It's only at the end of Homecoming that he goes back to his homemade hoodie.
Into the Spider-Verse, however, takes the cake on this particular trope, with bad costumes
all over the place.
Not only does Peter spend most of the movie rocking sweatpants and mismatched shoes, but
Miles Morales doesn't get his costume until the very end.
Before that, most of his spidery adventures take place while he's wearing a cheap Spider-Man
Halloween costume, purchased, of course, from smilin' Stan Lee.
No refunds.
Incidentally, these are all just "bad" costumes.
If you're looking for the evil costumes, well, that's a different guy.
"Outstanding!
Now let's bite all their heads off and pile them up in the corner."
Spider-Man's life is pretty much defined by tragedy.
It's the core of his character, the "hard luck hero" aspect that makes him so easy to
relate to.
But if the movies go back to that well all the time, it gets both boring and a little
too depressing.
As much as we like watching him get knocked down, it's always better to see him get back
up again.
That's why the movies always show us something to remind us that being Spider-Man is actually
kind of awesome, and more than a little fun.
"But after everything, I still love being Spider-Man.
I mean, who wouldn't?"
Spider-Verse gives us all kinds of moments like this, from Spider-Man cutting an album
of Christmas Carols to the extended comedy of Miles accidentally getting his hand stuck
to Gwen Stacy's hair.
Throw in some Karate Kid-style web-swinging lessons, and it does a great job of showing
us that having super-powers is actually pretty cool.
The Raimi movies do it, too, leaning into zany comedy with Peter zipping around the
city on his web-lines to deliver pizzas.
He even looks like he's having fun with that dance number, even if no one else is.
Amazing Spider Man 2 takes that to the next level, with Spidey getting to his graduation
through a series of wild rides and slapstick, crime-fighting hijinx.
It's Homecoming that does this the best, though, with the montage of Peter's after-school activities
as the friendly neighborhood superhero.
Not only is he excited to get out there and start doing good, he gets a churro from a
nice lady that he eats while hanging out on a fire escape, and even does a backflip when
he's asked to by members of the public.
That's what sets Spider-Man apart from the other superheroes: he's the guy who will stop
and argue with you about who makes the best sandwich.
"Yeah, best sandwich in Queens…"
"Sub Haven’s pretty good."
"Eh, it's too much bread."
"I like bread."
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