Sagging webs: A sad ranking of the worst ever Spider-Man movies
There goes the neighborhood! Your favorite friendly neighborhood Spider-Man will be breaking out of New York City and slinging his web across the globe soon for Spiderman: Far from Home, sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming. Marvel big cheese Kevin Feige explained the movie’s many filming locations during an interview with io9:
We start filming early July. We film in London. We shot first film in Atlanta. And we shoot a lot of films in London, but there’s another reason we’re shooting in London which is, yes, Spidey of course will spend some time in New York, but he’ll spend some time in other parts of the globe.
Friendly international Spider-Man it is! We expect Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) will likely be reluctantly lending the kid his private jet for this sojourn. Hopefully there’s at least one scene of him letting loose in Amsterdam and waking up caught in his own webbing covered in “magic brownie” dust, but it seems unlikely.
Spider-Man (and Peter Parker by extension) has always been depicted as little more than a downtown Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) whose superpower isn’t just slinging webs; it’s also being a smarmy, obnoxious a**hole.
Inexplicably, people continue to love Spider-Man and the movies continue to be rebooted and will likely continue to be until after we’re all long gone. The Spider-Man franchise could even outlive the apocalypse! Here are the Spider-Man movies ranked from “surprisingly entertaining” to “They spent how much money on this dreck?”.
6. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
That’s right – unsurprisingly our favorite of the entire franchise is the one in which Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) terrorizes New York and James Franco (The Disaster Artist) chews the scenery like an all-you-can-eat buffet of camp theatrics as the vengeful Harry Osborn.
5. Spider-Man (2002)
In fact, all of Sam Raimi’s contributions to the Spider-Man canon are pretty wonderful. The premiere attempt to bring the web slinging hero to the screen gave us the world’s most uncomfortable looking upside kiss, Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia) at her cutest, and Tobey Maguire (Wonder Boys) discovering white gunk shoots out of his body like a pubescent boy discovering a Playboy centrefold for the first time.
4. Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Yes, we’re aware it’s terrible but somehow it’s still enjoyable. We’ll defend the ludicrous sequence in which Peter becomes an emo disco-dancing fright until our dying day, ladies and gentlemen. Fight us.
3. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Marc Webb’s ill-fated reboot of the franchise gave the story a fresh hit of tender sincerity with Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) and Emma Stone (La La Land) bringing some lit chemistry to proceedings.
It’s a little dubious to believe the charming and clearly very attractive Garfield in the role of the local dork, though, no matter how dweeby he appears clunking about with his camera and backpack like a kid out to score a new Boy Scout patch.
2. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Starring Michael Keaton as Birdman (or sorry, “Vulture” as he’s known in this film), this cumbersome effort packs a plethora of generic storytelling into over two hours of screen time that feels more like five.
1. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Full of plotholes and terrible CGI, Webb’s second attempt at a Spider-Man story slings a web for the skies but flies the story face first into a museum of misfires. It is dreadful.
Like Homecoming, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 overstretches its story to over two hours and features Jamie Foxx (Electro) as one of the most disappointing villains of any superhero movie to date – including Topher Grace’s disastrous depiction of Venom in Spider-Man 3, which is really saying something.
