8 Things Nobody Wants To Admit About MCU Spider-Man

6. He's Only Been Used As A Vehicle To Process Iron Man's Legacy

Sony Pictures Releasing

Just to qualify everything in this entry: Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home are good comic book films. Within the context of the MCU specifically, they're actually excellent. Both films do a tremendous job with Spidey's villains and there's a conscious effort made to reappraise the legacy of Tony Stark, albeit one that's sometimes at odds with Peter's own journey onscreen.

The high school dynamic is also a stark improvement over Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man films. Director Jon Watts applies the spirit of John Hughes' seminal coming of age dramas to Spider-Man, and when it works, it REALLY works.

The issue with Homecoming and Far From Home isn't that they're bad comic book movies, but that they are bad Spider-Man movies. The high school element is the perfect setting for a story dedicated to exploring the web-slinger's mythology, but so far both have spent the majority of their time processing Iron Man's legacy, and how Peter factors into it.

Adrian Toomes is superbly reimagined in Homecoming, played to perfection by Michael Keaton - as is Quentin Beck by Jake Gyllenhaal in the sequel. However, both characters serve near enough the same purpose in detailing how Tony Stark's arrogance did major harm. Both have their own motivations and differences, but their battles with Peter ultimately perform the same function in working through Iron Man's legacy.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.