In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a couple of dazzling scenes in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland now takes center stage in Spider-Man: Homecoming. If the superhero genre is the dominant Hollywood trend of this century, the Spider-Man pictures are largely responsible—and along with the nine films in the X-Men universe, constitute the form’s most significant subgenre.
The only unambiguously good movie out of the first six was Spider-Man 2, which manages to be funny and touching as it details the difficulties Parker faces as a poor young man just out of college trying to maintain a romantic relationship and hold down a job and eke out a living when he feels like he must be on call 24-7 to save ordinary people from the bad guys. A record of achievement that low shouldn’t have generated so many pictures. But then the Spider-Man subgenre exists primarily because of the peculiarities of the deal that secured Sony Pictures the rights to the character of Spider-Man.
