Why Do We Love Spider-Man So Much?

Why does everyone love Spider-Man so much? When “Spider-Man: No Way Home” came out at the end of 2021, it made an insane amount of money ($814 million in the U.S. alone), blasting away any vestige of that era’s comic-book-movie fatigue. I thought the reason for the film’s mind-boggling success was obvious: It had three Spider-Men in it — Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and the OG Tobey Maguire — and that made it a unique royal-family reunion of spider-veined spandex.

There was a perfect storm of happenstance to how that confluence came to be. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (an infinitely better movie) had come out two years before, and borrowing deeply from the comic books it did a brilliant job of injecting head-spinning multiverse madness into the Spider-Man saga. The makers of “No Way Home” said, in essence, “Let’s do the same thing — only in a pandering, overstuffed, how-many-movie-stars-can-dangle-from-the-end-of-a-web? way.” I thought it was the definition of a one-shot.

But “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” has rewritten the playbook again. The movie is a solid and well-executed adventure, no more and no less, in which Holland’s Peter Parker and his love, MJ (Zendaya), barely even get to talk (because she doesn’t remember who she is). No one is pretending that “Brand New Day” is as great as, say, “Spider-Man 2.” Yet despite that, it is now likely to become…the top-grossing movie of all time. At least until the next Spider-Man adventure comes along.

Why Spider-Man, why now? Ever since his debut in 1962, he has been immensely popular (though Stan Lee had to fight a skeptical publisher to approve the character). But if you look back over 50 years of American comic-book-movie culture, it’s undeniable that the two reigning superheroes have been Superman and Batman. Christopher Reeve’s performance in the first two “Superman” films remains, to me (and many others), the most perfect…