Why Do We Love Spider-Man So Much?

Why does everyone love Spider-Man so much? When “Spider-Man: No Way Home” came out at the end of 2021, it made an insane amount of money ($814 million in the U.S. alone), blasting away any vestige of that era’s comic-book-movie fatigue. I thought the reason for the film’s mind-boggling success was obvious: It had three Spider-Men in it — Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and the OG Tobey Maguire — and that made it a unique royal-family reunion of spider-veined spandex.

There was a perfect storm of happenstance to how that confluence came to be. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (an infinitely better movie) had come out two years before, and borrowing deeply from the comic books it did a brilliant job of injecting head-spinning multiverse madness into the Spider-Man saga. The makers of “No Way Home” said, in essence, “Let’s do the same thing — only in a pandering, overstuffed, how-many-movie-stars-can-dangle-from-the-end-of-a-web? way.” I thought it was the definition of a one-shot.

But “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” has rewritten the playbook again. The movie is a solid and well-executed adventure, no more and no less, in which Holland’s Peter Parker and his love, MJ (Zendaya), barely even get to talk (because she doesn’t remember who she is). No one is pretending that “Brand New Day” is as great as, say, “Spider-Man 2.” Yet despite that, it is now likely to become…the top-grossing movie of all time. At least until the next Spider-Man adventure comes along.

Why Spider-Man, why now? Ever since his debut in 1962, he has been immensely popular (though Stan Lee had to fight a skeptical publisher to approve the character). But if you look back over 50 years of American comic-book-movie culture, it’s undeniable that the two reigning superheroes have been Superman and Batman. Christopher Reeve’s performance in the first two “Superman” films remains, to me (and many others), the most perfect live-action embodiment of a superhero there has ever been. Those first two films loom mythologically.

After that, it was Batman who ruled for decades as the comic-book-movie antihero of our age. Batman is, of course, the only superhero who possesses no superpowers, which makes him uniquely like us. (With a bit more attitude, we feel like we could be him.) He’s the brooding cool film-noir god of the existential night who speaks to our alienation, which is why Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is the greatest comic-book movie ever made. And let’s not underestimate the original creationist jolt given to live-action superhero culture by the indelible “Batman” TV series of the late ’60s. In half-hour episodes shot on cruddy sets, that show achieved the uncanny sense of being a comic book come to life. Adam West’s performance conveyed gravitas with a wry wink that’s never been matched.

Does sweet, genial, wholesomely sexy Tom Holland really compete with all of that? Holland has grown in confidence as an actor, and there’s no doubt that he now owns the role of Peter Parker even more than Tobey Maguire did (Garfield, stuck in a sub-par chapter of the franchise, always looked glum and a bit lost). A generation has grown up with Holland, and now that his Peter is a young adult, he seems poised to rule all the more. One reason that superhero fatigue is always lingering around the corner is that the very quality that attracts us to comic-book superheroes — their Olympian strength and majesty, their pumped iconography of invincibility — is also, in an underlying way, exhausting. More and more, they come at us jam-packed into teams: the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four. How super can a hero really be when the world is lined with them?

Spider-Man provides a cathartic relief from all that, coalescing around the keyword that almost everyone uses to describe him: relatability. Peter Parker, as we all know, starts off as an ordinary high schooler contending with the effects of a spider bite as if they were the onset of puberty. (He has to harness and control the act of shooting sticky webs out of his wrist.) He’s got bully problems, girlfriend problems, as well as secretly sensitive hidden-identity problems. He’s the James Dean of superheroes (the web-swinging crime fighter as misunderstood kid), and the way Holland embodies him, with a buff abashment just this side of shy, he’s like a boy-band star audiences want to cuddle up with. He also sticks to his home turf of New York City (he needs its canyons to swing), and to the comrades who surround him like family. In an all-superhero-politics-is-local way, that’s a crucial part of his relatability.

Yet Peter, as a young adult, also strikes a special balance that speaks to us right now. In 1978, a scruffy but ultimately more optimistic time, the character of Superman kicked off comic-book-movie culture by being valiant, chiseled, indomitable, supreme. A decade later, as the glittery ’80s were starting to crash and burn, Batman arrived to take center stage: a wealthy player who had a hidden dark side, a gruff manner, and a “power” that was a grand illusion. His real power had to come from within.

Spider-Man is the superhero for our time because he’s the perfect spiritual fusion of Superman and Batman. He wears all-American red-and-blue spandex and does an exhilarating version of flying around; he’s an Eagle Scout believer in his own destiny. But he’s also masked and furtive and traumatized. In “Brand New Day,” when his spidery abilities get discombobulated, he literally doesn’t know which end is up. And that makes him a mirror of how so many of us feel in these scary days of American turmoil: yearning to stand up to the darkness, yet also mired in it. In the “Spider-Verse” films, which are every bit as amazing (as cinema) as Spider-Man himself, he grapples with issues of identity that make Batman’s look like child’s cosplay. Who is Spider-Man? He’s the light and dark sides of comic-book culture poured into one. He’s the superhero who speaks to our anxieties and our dreams, the romantic teen idol who has to keep figuring out who he is. He makes us all feel like we’re hanging — thrillingly — by a thread.