How Marvel Made Spider-Man Great Again with ‘Homecoming’

How Marvel Made Spider-Man Great Again with ‘Homecoming’

Entertainment | 07/06/2017 | 10:00 AM
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When Peter Parker became a modern cinematic icon in 2002’s Spider-Man, it wasn’t just because of his amazing wall-crawling, web-slinging abilities. It was more than that. More than the spider-bite origin story, the death of Uncle Ben, the unrequited love for the redhead out of his league. It was partly how homemade his super-persona felt, and the joy (and puns) he found in his powers. And partly how intimately director Sam Raimi intertwined the stakes of Peter’s personal and superhero lives—his greatest Big Bad, the Green Goblin, after all, was his best friend’s dad. But all of it, the upside-down kiss, the battle at the Brooklyn Bridge, might never have amounted to much had Peter Parker not been so well-defined as an individual, one we felt we knew painfully well.

Raimi’s first two near-perfect Spider-Man movies spend more time outlining Parker through life’s mundane indignities than through his headline-grabbing heroics. He’s a loser. Like, the kind even other losers on the school bus refuse to sit next to. He’s a kid-genius, but a mess—he loses a menial job as a pizza boy because he can’t deliver on-time, and he’s so strapped for cash he sells photographs of himself as Spider-Man to a tabloid editor who hates him. He can’t talk to women. And yet he is such a fool in love that almost every risk he takes is for the girl next door. (He even gets bit by that spider while taking Mary Jane’s picture. It’s both beautiful and embarrassing.) Peter’s life is tinged with tragedy, too, but rarely of the remarkable kind. Aunt May struggles to keep up with her mortgage. Mary Jane’s dad is an abusive alcoholic. Ben dies not at the hands of a supervillain, but because he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all the while, the absence of Peter’s parents, who died when he was young, looms unspoken in the background.

Peter Parker is ordinary, that is, even after he gains superpowers. He’s prone to fits of doubt and self-consciousness. He tells bad jokes and makes mistakes. He’s like us. What makes him a hero then isn’t the suit or the webbing—it’s how hard he tries to be a good person. That’s what we root for, fiercely. And it’s why this dweeb from Queens, in a universe of powerful gods, billionaires, and intergalactic icons, is still one of Marvel’s most beloved (and lucrative, to the tune of $1.3 billion a year) creations, even 55 years after his comic book debut. Aunt May phrases the appeal best in Spider-Man 2, after Spidey goes into hiding, and she loses the house and hires a young neighbor named Henry to help her pack: “Kids like Henry need a hero,” she tells Peter. “Courageous, self-sacrificing people setting examples for all of us. Everybody loves a hero. People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they’ll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them to hold on a second longer. I believe there’s a hero in all of us that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble…Spider-Man did that for Henry and he wonders where he’s gone. He needs him.”

It’s a great speech. But of course, in real life, Spider-Man never left. Apart from the comics and dozens of animated series and films, the webhead’s starred in three live-action film franchises in 15 years. Still, most fans would say the last great Spider-Man story told onscreen was Raimi’s first sequel in 2004. Tobey Maguire’s final turn as Spidey came in the regrettably overstuffed Spider-Man 3. Andrew Garfield starred in an Amazing Spider-Man reboot in 2012, followed by a 2014 sequel for which the less is said, the better.

There is a silver lining though: that last flop netted just half the domestic box office haul of Raimi’s first Spider-Man, forcing Sony, the studio with the keys to the character’s screen rights, to finally pause for reflection. One flight to then-Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlbold