Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Made Him Junior Iron Man
On corporate media, the figures we remember, and not having to consume everything The Mouse puts in front of your face
The three most famous and recognizable comic book characters ever all belong to DC Comics at present time. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman comprise the company’s holy trinity. While Marvel dominates the box office with their film properties, their biggest star probably comes in fourth place, maybe third place if you’re feeling especially misogynistic and want to claim Wonder Woman doesn’t mean as much as the web-slinging, wisecracking Peter Parker, better known as Spider-Man. I wouldn’t make that argument, but there’s no denying the webhead is Marvel’s lead player on a historical basis. The business behind it bears out, because when the comics company was strapped for cash in the ‘90s, film distributors wanted movie rights to Spider-Man first and foremost. Even though the X-Men and Blade made it to the silver screen first, Spidey was perhaps the most anticipated franchise to make it to the big screen. The MCU improbably hit it big without him, leaning on the fact that they had to make actual good movies with the properties they had left. Suffice to say now, Iron Man and Captain America are A-listers, but in 2007, when they had the bright idea to start a movie universe from scratch, the Avengers were the B-team outside of maybe the Incredible Hulk.
Of course, the siren call of making money allowed Sony to put down their guard and play nice with the Disney corporation. The result has been Tom Holland’s turn as Peter Parker across five films so far with a sixth, Spider-Man: No Way Home, set to hit theaters later this month. The reviews have been mixed with Holland’s affable personality as the big plus and the narrative choices by Disney writers to make him Tony Stark’s and now apparently Stephen Strange’s little buddy being the drawback. The main thing to take from this is that Disney can be stonewalled. While The Mouse was able to win a war of attrition with 20th Century Fox on the rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, Sony has found Spider-Man profitable enough to keep the rights in house.
Sony has not outlasted Disney so far because they’re better at business. The entire reason for this stalemate is that Spider-Man is the closest thing Marvel has to an iconic, standalone figure that DC has. As much as Spidey has been The Dude for them over the years, Marvel’s best comics have almost always been predicated on a wide web of characters interacting with each other. Teams like the X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the Defenders (to a lesser extent on that last one) were always the draw. Big, overarching crossover events marked their calendars with great success. It’s not to say DC hasn’t also thrived in this area from time to time, but they’re clearly stronger in telling stories with strong leading characters rather than teams. Marvel fans will point to the Avengers over Tony Stark generally, while DC fans prefer Batman over the Justice League. I’m not saying this is a 100 percent true analysis all the time. Perception, however, totally plays that way.
Capitalism is never about finding your niche and thriving in it when you get to be as big as Disney. You have to dominate every corner or else you can’t attain infinite growth. Obviously, there is a finite well of resources available to the human race right now. Infinite growth is impossible, but when the main driver of creation is greed and not utility, then you get unrealistic points of view. In all the deserved hate the MCU gets right now, no one should lose sight of the fact that these movies are, in theory, pleasing and serve a niche. Stellan Skarsgard, who played Dr. Erik Selvig, in the Thor and Avengers movies, summed it up concisely when he said these movies are “always making money but not enough for an investor” recently. It’s not just about creating a rising tide to raise all ships either. It’s about creating a monopoly so big that governments that are supposed to regulate markets say “we don’t feel like enforcing our antitrust laws, so we’ll give you an exemption.”
From that viewpoint, Disney’s treatment of Spider-Man makes all the sense in the world. Parker and his friends, featuring a colorful rogue’s gallery, fun allies, and a successor to the Spider mantel who arguably has grown more popular than Parker in Miles Morales, is the property that defied all expectation. Spidey is profitable away from the shell of Disney and the expansive multimedia universe it created from the scraps of IP Marvel had left from its ‘90s movie rights fire sale. The X-Men and Fantastic Four fizzled enough that Fox surrendered. Why couldn’t Spider-Man 3 or Amazing Spider-Man 2 be bad enough to make Sony come crawling back to sell their property for pennies on the dollar? The answer is that Spidey is a cultural phenomenon, the only such icon that Marvel has to put against DC’s big three.
In order to leech that drawing power away from Parker and the Spidey franchise on the whole, it’s now clear why Disney decided to make Spider-Man Iron Man’s lil’ buddy. Spider-Man, the iconoclast, is a gutsy and witty character who defies his own poverty to invent web shooters and stand as THE street-level hero on Marvel’s roster. He answers to none of his peers, but instead slavishly devotes himself to his aunt and his girlfriend. His struggles are deeply personal. The only problem he has with a symbiotic relationship is the one the Venom goo has with him for a short time. What Disney did was break that individuality down with haste. Parker is no longer his own man but a kid who has no sense of direction, not without Tony Stark, not without Happy Hogan, and now, not without Stephen Strange. It’s only surprising to people who aren’t fans of professional wrestling.
Whenever a wrestler was getting ready to leave one promotion to go to another one, it would be a general practice for the former company to have that wrestler lose as many matches as possible on the way out. It’s a practice that makes sense from a narrative standpoint; if a wrestler was not going to be around in three months, why would they win a match and hold a victory over someone who was? However, there’s a more sinister reason why promoters would do that, although it worked much better in the days when people weren’t as hyper aware that the product was scripted rather than a legitimate athletic contest. The idea would be that the wrestler losing matches would have their drawing power diminished on the way out. Then, when they appeared in the other company, they wouldn’t be as big of a deal and thus wouldn’t help that new company compete or exceed the old one. The logic is flimsy because people have known wrestling has been fake for longer than anyone would care to admit. Plus, a new face appearing in a promotion is always one of the inexhaustible thrills available to pro wrestling fans, one that is finally making a comeback now that WWE has legitimate competition in All Elite Wrestling.
It's not working for Disney either. The biggest proof is that the most well-received Spider-Man movie since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 from way back in 2004 was Into The Spider-Verse, an animated feature focused on Morales mostly and with no connection to Disney’s MCU whatsoever. The fact that it grossed nearly $400M worldwide without the Disney machine behind it feels like a more accurate temperature read on the character than any response Disney could elicit with Holland’s portrayal. And that’s why the Disney machine is not able to wrest fully the rights to that corner of the Marvel universe back from Sony. It’s not saying Spider-Man won’t be a part of the MCU going forward. Quite to the contrary, Sony producer Amy Pascal confirmed there will be three more Spidey movies in the MCU and that Holland will reprise his role as Parker in at least one of them.
As much of a fan of the MCU that I am – I thought both Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings were fantastic movies this year – one must realize that the pitfalls of making all entertainment corporate is that now these beloved characters will be divorced from the things that made them popular in the first place if they could be used as cudgels in a bidding war. The things that made Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield such great turns as Parker are missing from Holland, even if Holland himself has done his best to make Spidey stand out among the throbbing mass of sheer characters the MCU has brought to the big screen so far. The dissonance between the Spider-Man before Captain America: Civil War and the MCU version is too loud to ignore. The worst thing is there’s nothing the fans can do about it, because corporate media is not beholden to the people who consume it, especially when the entity is as large as Disney. Even if Spider-Man failed in the MCU, there are hundreds of characters The Mouse could prop up in his place. If the MCU had failed, they still have Star Wars and PIXAR and the main cottage industry of retelling fables and fairytales.
For those who grew up reading Spider-Man comics, that Peter Parker is long gone. Who knows how the MCU will handle Miles Morales, because you know they’re going to have a take on that version of Spidey. The point is that whatever the celluloid future of that character holds is in the hands of focus groups. What will make that version of Parker great is not what made the old version of him great. Whether or not you find that okay is how malleable your taste is. More accurately, it’s more about how much you realize where the state of entertainment is going. If worse comes to worse, the current iteration of Spider-Man should not diminish your memories of him, whether they be in older movies, cartoons, or comics. You don’t have to consume everything that Disney or Sony or anyone churns out. Learn to be selective. If you can handle Parker as Tony Stark, Jr., then the new movies are for you. If not? Disney doesn’t need your money. Perhaps someone smaller with better ideas that lean more towards auteur entertainment if not art has what you’re looking for. The point is that the only things you really need in life are food, water, shelter, medical care, and information. Everything else is just gravy. Once you learn that, then Peter Parker pining for his dead techlord mentor instead of his girlfriend whom he could not save can’t hurt you.