In many ways the entirety of geek culture – certainly as far as the movies are concerned – is built on giving the people what they want. The Flash exhumed Michael Keaton’s Batman, but left him drifting through the end-of-days haze of a dying cinematic universe. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine returned for one last hurrah in Deadpool & Wolverine, even though we already had his last hurrah in Logan. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness brought back Patrick Stewart’s Professor X for the umpteenth time, then promptly shredded him into psychic confetti.
And then there was Spider-Man: No Way Home, a movie that mainly seemed to exist to remind us that the original Sony Spidey films were really rather good in places. Has there ever been a better cinematic Spider-Man villain than Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin? Did any of the Marvel films give us an antagonist with the same startling blend of pathos and menace as that delivered by Alfred Molina’s Doc Oc? And what about Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, the two wall-crawlers we never thought we’d see again, who somehow turned a fan-service cameo into an elegy for the superhero genre itself?
