The continued dominance of superhero movies has a lot of implications for the genre’s future. For one thing, it means that origin stories are all but obsolete, especially for characters who’ve already gotten multiple big-screen adventures. Spider-Man is on his fourth live-action run (if you count 1977’s Amazing Spider-Man), and when he swung into Marvel’s Cinematic Universe in 2016, Marvel assumed his origin would feel like a redundancy. Most know that the mild-mannered Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, and that the relationship between his powers and the responsibility that comes with them was paramount to his superhero creed. That’s why, when we meet the freshly rebooted webslinger (played by Tom Holland) in Captain America: Civil War, it’s Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark delivering the bulk of his backstory in a rapid-fire nutshell.
That introduction made sense for an already crowded Avengers movie, and it provided a fine foundation for Peter’s first solo movie, Homecoming. Ten years on, however, the flaws in this Spider-Man’s origins are clear. Civil War retconned Spidey into the MCU, claiming he was always around behind the scenes. But he was introduced less like a hero in his own right than as an appendage to Iron Man, and as his solo adventures continued, Spidey couldn’t shake his status as an accessory. No Way Home made a smart move in stripping Peter of everything he might have depended on, and now his fourth outing in the MCU, Brand New Day, is going even further to correct Civil War’s mistakes.
