Do more Spider-Men Make a Better Spider-Man Movie?
Spider-man has a Spider-Man problem. Spider-people breed like, well, spiders I guess, and are starting to infest their own films with too many of themselves. Someone in a boardroom seems to believe this is a good idea. We put it to the test and find out empirically whether the committees designing these films are right.
The recent Madam Web, and it’s weird need to pack as many Spider-Women into the film as it could got me thinking. Do more Spider-People result in a better movie? Let’s find out.
Madam Web
Spider-men: 3
This one’s just for the girls, as Dakota Johnson’s future peaking Madam Web pulls together a team of three future Spider-women hunted down by a guy who can also see the future and doesn’t want them ruining his good time. Unfortunately this one was dead on arrival at the box office despite the best efforts of it’s cast. It ended up with a shockingly low critic score that summarised that it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten all at the same time, making itself the perfect example of a post Endgame super hero film.
Critic score: 17%
Venom
Spider-men: 0
As one of the first Spiderverse films to not star our friendly neighbourhood spider-guy Venom makes the perfect control group for this experiment. I personally dug this attempt at a movie and Tom Hardy was an inspired choice. This opinion more closely matched the final audience score for the film but the critics were not impressed.
Critic Score: 30%
Spider-man
Spider-men: 1
Sam Raimi’s original Spider-man film is as good as it gets for solo spidey films. It stood up and did it’s thing when Tony Stark was still relatively unknown by the general movie-going public. It didn’t need more than one Spider-man to be a crowd pleaser.
Critic Score: 90%
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Spider-men: 3
Disney Marvel’s attempt to scrape together the dogs breakfast Sony had made of the spider-verse resulted in them bringing together the young Tom Holland, the original Tobey Maguire, and the forgotten middle child Andrew Garfield. It managed to notch just 3% more points on it’s score making it the most popular live action film to date.
Critic Score: 93%
Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse
Spider-men: 7
Long before Marvel’s No Way Home started jumping universes Sony took one last big shot with Spider-man with an incredibly slick animated version. It payed off big time and is now the most highly rated Spidey film released. I think it says a lot as well that the animated films are so good they are regularly included in lists like this one. How many animated Batman movies are there? A bunch, and you’re never going to see them next to The Dark Knight.
Critic score: 97%
Spider-man: Across the Spiderverse
Spider-men: 95
Across the Spiderverse went bonkers with its cameos. We decided to stick to the conservative number of included spider-peeps. Co-director Justin Thompson isn’t even sure how many there are in the film, chucking out a number of about 280 varients, but only 95 of those being named actually named, so we went with that number. It’s one of the few perfect sequels out there, and the writing is razor sharp with zero loose ends. Well apart from the gaping big cliffhanger we got left on.
Critic score: 95%
