It seems positively absurd to say this now, but in the summer of 2002, Spider-Man reached cinema audiences as a relative novelty. The superhero genre was not dormant, though neither was it all-consuming. The goth-kitsch Batman cycle of the 1990s had petered out at that point, but successful adaptations of Blade and X-Men had resurrected Marvel Comics as viable cinematic fodder after direct-to-video stabs at Captain America and The Punisher.
Blade, however, was an R-rated gorefest aiming for cultish endurance; X-Men, while a notch more accessible to younger viewers, was still a dark-ish, dour-ish affair intended first to please comic book loyalists. Swinging on to screens 20 years ago today, Spider-Man was different: a bright, goofy, youthful adventure with a wholesomeness that the genre hadn’t seen since the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films two decades before.
