How Spider-Man's Relatability Made Him Cinema's Top Hero — SkimNews
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- Spider-Man: No Way Home earned $814 million in the U.S. alone at the end of 2021, blasting away that era's comic-book-movie fatigue by uniting three live-action Spider-Men — Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now 'likely to become the top-grossing movie of all time,' the essay argues, even though the film is judged 'no more and no less' than 'a solid and well-executed adventure'
- Tom Holland now 'owns the role of Peter Parker even more than Tobey Maguire did,' with a generation having grown up with his portrayal, which the author likens to 'a boy-band star audiences want to cuddle up with'
- For 50 years, the two reigning American comic-book-movie superheroes have been Superman and Batman — embodied by Christopher Reeve's first two 'Superman' films and Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight,' which the essay calls 'the greatest comic-book movie ever made'
- Spider-Man's appeal centers on the 'relatability' of an ordinary high schooler dealing with bully problems, girlfriend problems, and hidden-identity struggles, all rooted in his New York City home turf
- Peter Parker in 'Brand New Day' represents what the author calls a 'spiritual fusion of Superman and Batman' — an all-American optimist in red-and-blue spandex who is also masked, furtive, and traumatized, mirroring how 'so many of us feel in these scary days of American turmoil'
- The Spider-Verse films grapple with 'issues of identity that make Batman's look like child-play,' positioning Spider-Man as the superhero who 'speaks to our anxieties and our dreams'
Why it matters: Spider-Man's ascent to top-grossing-film territory reframes the commercial engine behind superhero franchises: audiences appear to be rewarding relatability and vulnerability over sheer spectacle, a thesis the Variety essay supports by contrasting Brand New Day's record trajectory with its modest critical standing. For Sony and Disney, that distinction recalibrates the franchise's path forward — the next Spider-Man film inherits a cultural thesis, not just a box-office record, to defend.
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