The trailer for Brand New Day (2026), the fourth Spider-Man movie in the MCU, was released last week, promising the most poignant movie in the quartet. Following the end of No Way Home (2021), Peter Parker is all alone as he tackles not only a new mysterious enemy but also mutations he cannot control.
Watching this trailer made me want to go back and see how the character had evolved on the big screen. For this article, I will only discuss the live-action movies, but I must mention that the animated Spider-Verse films deserve a dedicated piece of their own. The original trilogy, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire, offers a mostly accurate adaptation of the comics, tackling quintessential Spider-Man themes like responsibility, sacrifice, and redemption. They’re the best kinds of superhero movies: the ones that wear their camp source material on their sleeves and don’t take themselves too seriously. While the third movie suffers from an overambitious story and confusion over whether it wants to be darker, these are still worth watching for superhero fans.
The Amazing Spider-Man instalments directed by Marc Webb and featuring Andrew Garfield have a more divisive legacy and despite modern appraisals I still think they’re inferior to the Raimi’s interpretation. Despite Garfield being solid casting on paper, the greatest issue his movies had was that they wanted to be a more grounded story that overarched the series rather than tell individual stories. The colourful designs Raimi embraced had their saturation dialled down, and Peter has a retconned backstory about his parents’ dying. Now, I acknowledge that only two of these movies were made, so hopefully the best was yet to come.
The MCU wants to be a middle ground between these two series. While not going overboard with the cheese, they remain mostly lighthearted stories and return to being unashamedly superhero movies. However, while the clear financial upscale doesn’t necessarily ruin the movies, it can certainly make them feel disingenuous as Spider-Man stories. ‘Friendly neighbourhood’ Spider-Man going on a globetrotting adventure isn’t an obvious choice and doesn’t blend well with the comic books (albeit Brand New Day seems to be remedying this).
I would say it’s fair to call Spider-Man one of the most human superheroes. Superman is an alien orphan, Batman is a brooding billionaire, Peter Parker is a teen with a part-time job and messy social life. Where the MCU and Raimi movies soared was never forgetting why we love his character: because he feels like one of us. And maybe that’s the sign of a real hero, not being the strongest in the universe, but the person strong enough to carry the weight of the world with a smile on your face.
Photo by Omegapepper on Openverse.
