While at an appearance at Fandemic Dead 2022, a gathering of fans of horror movies, film star Bruce Campbell took a swipe at recent box office juggernaut Spider-Man: No Way Home, saying “The recent Spider-Man, was there a recent Spider-Man movie? I didn’t know, I was in the good ones. I wouldn’t know.”
Bruce Campbell has long been a favorite of genre film fans, both for his breezy off-the-cuff leading man style in films like Evil Dead and Maniac Cop, as well as his candid and approachable off-screen persona at conventions dedicated to those movies. So it was no surprise when, at an appearance where he spent thirty minutes detailing the ups and downs of his career, he took a firmly tongue-in-cheek approach to a question from an audience member about Spider-Man: No Way Home, a movie he didn’t appear in.
The question began, “I just want to say, I’m a big fan of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films.” “The Sam Raimi Spider-Man films,” Campbell repeated. Sam Raimi is the director of the original Evil Dead trilogy,the horror film that first brought star Campbell and Raimi, high school friends in Michigan, to fame. In the early 2000s, Raimi directed a trilogy of movies about the comic book wallcrawler that earned critical kudos and billions of dollars in an era before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made “comic book movies” its own genre.
While Campbell didn’t star in the Spider-Man trilogy — the leads were Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Kirsten Dunst as his love interest Mary Jane — he cameoed in small roles in all three movies. When asked why he wasn’t in the recent billion dollar Marvel/Sony Spider-Man: No Way Home, Campbell feigned ignorance of its existence. He went on to describe his scene in the first film, in which he played a theater usher who stops Parker from seeing Mary Jane act in a play, “I won’t let him into the theater because it spoils the illusion. I’m the only character who ever defeated Spider-Man, no lie. Enormously successful.”
Raimi’s next movie will be Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and according to one fan, last month Campbell confirmed a theory that he filmed another cameo for his old friend. So it looks like Bruce Campbell will be there to once again foil a superhero.