


The setting might as well have been an office building in suburban Atlanta. (The first entry featured a huge set piece at the Washington Monument - an inspired idea on paper - and did absolutely nothing interesting with it. Stark, I don’t feel so good.”)īut in most other respects, Watts’s Spider-Man films have been black holes of imagination. They’ve also managed to mine the age gap between him and other characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for humor as well as one meme-worthy moment of genuine pathos. As a result, the filmmakers for this latest Spidey cycle, including director Jon Watts and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, have been able to sell us on some of Peter’s dodgier choices. Holland, by contrast, was 21 when Spider-Man: Homecoming premiered in 2017, and he looked even younger. It’s not so much that those actors were too old for the material it’s that the material could never fully utilize the character’s youth and inexperience because we as humans have a visceral resistance to watching people who clearly aren’t kids making childish decisions. Tobey Maguire had been 27 at the time of his first turn as the high-school-age superhero, while Andrew Garfield had been 29. The one good idea that the Tom Holland–starring Spider-Man films had was a simple, obvious one: They really did make Peter Parker a kid.
