As one of the most enduringly popular characters on the planet, a position that’s been retained for close to 60 years, you could make the argument that there’s no such thing as too much Spider-Man in the eyes of many fans.
However, the web-slinger has become almost ubiquitous over the last two decades, to the point that familiarity creeping in is a real danger. We had Sam Raimi’s trilogy with Tobey Maguire, before the reboot with Andrew Garfield landed just five years after Spider-Man 3. Tom Holland’s debut in Captain America: Civil War came 23 months after The Amazing Spider-Man 2, with No Way Home marking Spidey’s seventh solo movie in 19 years.
Throw in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and sequel Across the Spider-Verse, never mind whatever Sony has in store for its own shared universe or Disney Plus animated series Freshman Year. That’s an awful lot of Peter Parker, with Kevin Feige admitting to ScreenRant that No Way Home bringing back old villains was done largely to give audiences something they’d never seen before.
“I think if we’ve learned anything over the years, and particularly just the deal between Disney and Sony to do these movies together, that almost anything is possible if enough people believe in it and have a passion for it. Kicking off with Peter Parker’s identity being revealed at the end of Far From Home immediately set us on a course for things we’d never seen before in a Spider-Man movie. That’s the fun of making movies, is to do things people haven’t seen before, and in the MCU there are ways that lots of amazing things can happen, and that Dr. Strange would be a good conduit to that.”
A sprawling multiversal epic that spans three generations of Spider-Man storytelling is nothing if not ambitious, and we can hardly believe that No Way Home is actually coming to theaters next week to cap off insane levels of hype and anticipation.
