“Like costume heroes? We think you may find our Spiderman just a bit… different!” So reads the opening of Amazing Fantasy #15, the coveted comic book issue that first introduced readers to Spider-Man. Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962, Spider-Man is more than just the most popular superhero of all time. He’s the ultimate avatar for the underdog spirit, an unlikely hero who harbors the only superpower that counts: never giving up.
You could say the same thing about his movies—they’re never, ever giving up making Spider-Man movies. Though the history of Spider-Man movies is a surprisingly short one, beginning in earnest just 25 years ago, the franchise now encompasses almost a dozen movies that have a cumulative gross of $11 billion worldwide. (Not bad for a New Yorker who is always broke and behind on his rent most of the time.)
With the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day upon us, we felt it was a good time to look back on Spider-Man’s surprisingly prolific cinematic history. Spidey has unfortunately had a few duds under his belt. But when a Spider-Man movie is good, there’s basically nothing else like it.
From the bad to the amazing, below is Esquire’s ranking of every Spider-Man movie. Is your favorite number one?
Honorable Mention: Captain America: Civil War (2016)
When our hype for all things MCU was at an all-time high, the unthinkable happened: Spider-Man joined the party. After The Amazing Spider-Man 2 failed to excite audiences, Sony and Marvel Studios came to an unprecedented agreement over the Spider-Man franchise. The new era for Spidey began in earnest with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, where Tom Holland made his official debut as the new Spider-Man for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
While Civil War is not at all a “Spider-Man movie,” it was still the deciding moment for Tom Holland to convince audiences that he was, in fact, the right man for the mask. Ten years and four solo movies later, it’s safe to say he did just that.
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Honorable Mention: Supaidāman: The Movie (1978)
You’ve never seen Spider-Man like this before. In the 1970s, Marvel struck a partnership with Toei, the Japanese film and TV studio behind superhero franchises like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai (the blueprint to Power Rangers). As part of the agreement, Marvel gave Toei free rein to adapt any of its characters. Toei chose Spider-Man, and in May 1978, Supaidāman starring Shinji Todō swung onto Japanese television.
In July 1978, Toei produced a half-hour spinoff “film” that premiered at that year’s Toei Cartoon Festival. Basically just a special episode shot on slightly higher-quality film stock, Supaidāman is quintessential tokusatsu with a familiar superhero at the center of it. It’s not really a movie per se, but seeing Spider-Man karate-chop monsters—in choreography designed by the legendary Japan Action Club—and pilot a giant Megazord is something you’ll never see in the MCU.
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12. Spider-Man (1977)
Superheroes dominated twenty-first century pop culture, but they were everywhere in the seventies, too. Shows like The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman, Super Friends, Shazam!, The Six Million Dollar Man/The Bionic Woman—it was another golden age. Among them was Spider-Man, with Nicholas Hammond as the first actor to play the Marvel icon in live-action. In September 1977, the series premiered with the 88-minute TV film (also plainly titled Spider-Man) on CBS.
As exciting as it might have been for children during the Carter administration, the plot is a snooze, and the action is shoddy even by the standards of its time. What’s worse, the absence of Uncle Ben and his paternal lessons of great power and great responsibility robs this Spidey of any emotional weight. There’s only one real way to enjoy this movie, and it’s watching it on an old VHS tape when you’re seven years old.
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11. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Beyond the tragic death of Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy (spoilers?), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 just couldn’t keep up when the MCU was breaking records. The second and last film centered on Andrew Garfield’s version of Spidey came in 2014, with Peter Parker investigating his parents’ deaths while confronting Electro (Jamie Foxx). Though the Garfield era of Spider-Man has its fans, the second film is plagued by all that ailed middling tentpoles in the 2010s: an oppressively somber tone, pointless Easter eggs, and weightless action scenes with overcooked visual effects. Honestly, Gwen Stacy is the lucky one here.
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10. Spider-Man 3 (2007)
After the highs of Sam Raimi’s first two outings, his third and final swing hit a wall like splat. Spider-Man 3, released in 2007, dared to juggle a then-unprecedented three villains at once: Sandman, Venom, and whatever the hell James Franco’s “Nu-Goblin” is supposed to be. The movie is a hot turd as a result, with contemporary audiences laughing their heads off at Tobey Maguire’s attempt at a darker alter ego (only to wind up “Emo Gene Kelly” instead). There’s only been reappraisal for Spider-Man 3 because we’ve let blockbusters become homogenized toy boxes in the years since. Let’s stop kidding ourselves: Spider-Man 3 really doesn’t have the juice.
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9. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Barely two months after the earth-shattering Avengers: Endgame, the MCU picked right back up with Spider-Man: Far From Home. While the Tom Holland-led sequel gets some points for trading New York scenery for exotic European locales—by virtue of a breezy summer vacation premise—Far From Home is too overshadowed by the grave importance of other movies to make us care about Spider-Man at all.
The Mysterio “twist” is barely one at all, the action is flat and sauceless, and conflating Peter Parker’s personal growth into making him a junior Tony Stark is an offensive misread of why we love Spider-Man. And ironically, taking Spidey out of his home turf only serves to remind us why he belongs in New York in the first place.
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8. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Yeah, yeah. It was cool to see Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. (Although you weren’t like me, in the trenches parsing through fact from unsubstantiated rumors every. single. day.) But however much Gen Z wants to make the theatrical release of No Way Home a core part of their post-pandemic memories, the film is a gross reinforcement of all that makes modern fandoms too radioactive to participate.
I can see the through-line of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker trying to figure out what hero he wants to be based on his time with “Peter 1” and “Peter 2,” but the audience clapping like seals is distracting me from feeling it.
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7. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Bad as Spider-Man 3 was, it was still a tall order for Andrew Garfield to assert his role as the new Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man came just five years after Maguire bowed, but the Hollywood landscape had swiftly changed in the time since. Movies like The Dark Knight raised the bar for cinematic blockbusters, while Twilight and The Hunger Games set a new tone for youth-oriented stories. Garfield’s first swing didn’t (and still doesn’t) measure up to what came before it. But Garfield and Emma Stone’s chemistry is undeniable, and a darker color palette actually serves the grittier tone well. Just harder to say if it’s a good Spider-Man movie.
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6. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Tom Holland won audiences over in Captain America: Civil War. But going into Spider-Man: Homecoming, a new question arose: Can he carry his own franchise?
Under the steady hand of director Jon Watts, Spider-Man: Homecoming grounded the MCU’s Peter Parker in the throes of high school melodrama, as the aspiring Avenger deals with crushes and homework and house parties and all other stuff that makes up the best years of our lives. Surrounding Peter is Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark (for a much-needed Avengers bump) and Michael Keaton as the Vulture, not to mention Zendaya as his future love interest. (Man, remember when Peter was fixated on Liz?)
With creative cues from John Hughes movies and Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Homecoming injected youthful vigor into a superhero franchise that was beginning to feel long in the tooth.
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5. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Years after the Oscar-winning revelation that was Into the Spider-Verse, the saga of Miles Morales continued in the beautiful 2023 sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. As exciting as its predecessor but with an even grander sense of scale, Across the Spider-Verse was genuinely worth the wait in its kaleidoscopic dive into the multiverse. We’re only ranking Across the Spider-Verse fairly “low” because of its cliffhanger ending; we won’t know how this plane lands until Beyond the Spider-Verse in 2027.
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4. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
It’s rare for a fourth installment of a series to feel so refreshing. But that’s the miracle of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Now under the guidance of Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man embarks on proper adulthood as he fights to save New York from a strange new menace while slowly reconnecting with the friends he lost in No Way Home.
Brand New Day sports some of the most mature storytelling yet told not only in the Spider-Man series but also in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. Coupled with breakneck action and a standout performance by Holland—who is now very, very comfortable in Spidey’s skin—this old spider can still show off some new tricks.
3. Spider-Man (2002)
I could just leave the link to Chad Kroeger’s “Hero” and call it square. (And you know what? Here you go.) But it cannot be overstated how big a deal Spider-Man was, and still is now. Released in 2002, Sam Raimi’s first movie with Tobey Maguire rewrote the superhero movie playbook just as the genre was starting to take off. In contrast to the leather-clad Blade and X-Men, Spidey wore his red and blue spandex proudly, and his bout against the nightmarish Green Goblin (an unforgettable Willem Dafoe) and crush on Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) made Spider-Man the ultimate coming-of-age epic of the summer—and maybe, of all time.
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2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
You thought you knew superheroes. Then came Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the first in the standalone series and the first to win a Best Feature Film Oscar. The movie places an overdue spotlight on Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn teenager who made his comic book debut in 2011 by writer Brian Michael Bendis.
Into the Spider-Verse wasn’t, and isn’t, just a standout superhero flick. It was an eye-opener for all of cinematic animation that boldly defied the conventions of high-fidelity 3D in favor of scraggly lines and unstable, chaotic energy—like a comic book blasted with nuclear radiation. That it still told a heartfelt story about growing up and standing out is nothing short of, ahem, amazing.
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1. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Has there ever been a more exciting superhero set piece than the train sequence? I don’t think so. Two years after Spider-Man, Sam Raimi and co. stepped things up with Spider-Man 2, a sequel that dug deeper and harder into the heart of Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker. A masterful fusion of the soul of The Amazing Spider-Man comics with Sam Raimi’s playful filmmaking (see: the hospital scene), Spider-Man 2 is one of the greatest superhero movies of all time and, without a doubt, the best Spider-Man movie ever made. Maybe one day we’ll see a movie that tops this mountain. Until then, Spider-Man 2 out-swings them all.
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