“When you can do the things that I can,” Peter Parker (Tom Holland) says in Captain America: Civil War, “but you don’t, and bad things happen, they happen because of you.” It was a roundabout way of getting at Peter’s superhero creed — “With great power comes great responsibility” — without really saying it. But given that the character was just 15 at the time, such clunkiness was easy to forgive. If nothing else, it told fans that his origins as Spider-Man still happened; they just happened off-screen.
By the time Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) comes to recruit Peter to the Avengers in Civil War, he’d already gained his powers through a radioactive spider bite, and most assumed he had also lost his beloved Uncle Ben shortly after. Those two experiences make up the one-two punch that other Spider-Man films wisely dubbed his “canon event.” After all, it’s Uncle Ben who first teaches Peter about great power and great responsibility — and when Peter fails to prevent Ben’s demise, those platitudes become the backbone of his moral code. It’s just as crucial to Spider-Man’s creation as the murders of Thomas and Martha Wayne are to the creation of Batman: Could Peter become his neighborhood’s resident wallcrawler without it?
