There are plenty of reasonable places to begin a Spider-Man marathon. You could go back to the early 2000s era with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, or revisit Andrew Garfield’s surprisingly underrated take from 2012. You could even web-sling straight into the animated brilliance of Into the Spider-Verse, which should be getting its third film within the next year. But in the wake of Spider-Man: Brand New Day giving Tom Holland’s Peter Parker his fourth solo outing, there’s no better time to go back to the beginning of his specific chapter.
Homecoming remains one of the most effortless entry points into the web-slinger’s cinematic legacy. Directed by Jon Watts, the MCU’s solo Spider-Man debut finally drops Peter Parker into a genuine high school environment, treating his teenage anxieties with as much weight as his superhero duties. Instead of rushing to save the universe, Peter wrestles with decathlon prep, awkward crushes, and local street-level crime. Watts captures a John Hughes-esque coming-of-age energy that grounds the character in a way previous adaptations rarely achieved. But you don’t have long to relive the web-slinging magic before it leaves Netflix on October 1.
Peter Parker has a lot to learn
Unlike Spider-Man’s previous films, Homecoming completely bypasses the all-too-familiar origin story of Peter’s powers. When the film begins, he’s already had his grand MCU introduction in Captain America: Civil War, having fought alongside the likes of Iron Man, Black Panther, Vision, and Black Widow. He not only survived a confrontation with Captain America but even stood toe to toe with The Winter Soldier and Falcon. He returns to Queens with a fancy new suit and approximately zero chill, and proceeds to get completely ignored by Tony Stark for the next few months. In Homecoming, Peter’s primary concern is trying to make it through high school without embarrassing himself, while fighting street-level crime in his spare time.
Peter’s low-stakes high school routine is quickly upended when he stumbles onto a dangerous black-market weapons ring. The operation is masterminded by none other than Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a former salvage contractor pushed to the financial brink after a corporate joint venture backed by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) drove his crew out of business following the Battle of New York from the first Avengers film. Fueled by resentment against the wealthy elite, Toomes scavenges advanced alien technology to manufacture deadly arms, taking to the skies in a winged suit of armor as the Vulture. Eager to prove to Stark that he’s ready to be a full-fledged Avenger, Peter takes it upon himself to dismantle Toomes’ ring, which sets him on a high-stakes collision course that threatens to shatter his fragile double life.
Toomes is a standout antagonist, not merely because Keaton’s performance brings a magnetic menace to the role, but also in how his backstory expands the MCU’s ground-level mythos by using the Department of Damage Control and the lingering debris from The Avengers to explore the blue-collar fallout of superhero battles. Rather than relying on some world-ending scheme, Homecoming grounds its stakes in working-class resentment, transforming Toomes into one of the most compelling villains in the entire franchise.
A standout scene featuring Keaton is the tense car ride in which Toomes slowly realizes that his daughter’s awkward homecoming date, sitting in the passenger seat, is the same masked kid ruining his business. Without a single CGI effect or superhero suit in sight, Keaton turns a fatherly speech in a parked car into an absolute masterclass of psychological dread. It’s the moment the entire film shifts shape and proves that intimate, character-driven stakes will always hit harder than a multiversal spectacle.
Marvel’s Eight-Year Problem
Beyond its narrative strengths, Homecoming is also worth revisiting for one of the funniest continuity blunders in MCU history. The film opens in the immediate wake of 2012’s The Avengers, before brazenly slapping an “Eight Years Later” title card on screen, a mathematical impossibility given that Civil War and Homecoming take place in 2016. Marvel eventually retconned the error in official timeline guides, but there’s an undeniable charm to the fact that the film cementing the MCU’s ultra-serialized era accidentally broke its own canon within the first five minutes. Honestly, bumbling a major timeline calculation feels on brand for Peter Parker.
Homecoming isn’t without its detractors, of course. At the time of release, many comic book purists bristled at Peter’s overreliance on high-tech Stark gear, arguing that the suit’s built-in AI, “instant kill mode,” and various other gadgets leaned too far into “Iron Man Jr.” territory. But viewed in hindsight, that tech-heavy foundation was a deliberate masterclass in long-term character development. By giving Peter an over-engineered crutch only to strip it all away right when he needs it most, Homecoming laid the groundwork for the more self-reliant Spider-Man we see in Brand New Day. Watching Peter realize that the hero isn’t the suit but the kid inside it makes witnessing his broader arc across the next three movies immensely satisfying to rewatch in full.
Is it the best live-action Spider-Man movie ever made? No, but before the soul-crushing loss of Infinity War and all the multiverse shenanigans thereafter, Homecoming gave fans exactly what they’ve been dying to see from the character in a feature-length film: a high school teenager living in Queens just trying to do the right thing.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is streaming on Netflix