The Complete Cinematic History of Spider-Man: Every Film From 1977 to Brand New Day: Chronological Order

If you only have one weekend

Watch Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and No Way Home (2021), in that order. That quartet contains the origin, the genre's high-water mark, the reinvention, and the payoff for everything before it. 

A note on what counts as a film here

The 1977 and 1978 CBS entries were television movies; two further instalments, Spider-Man Strikes Back and Spider-Man: The Dragon's Challenge, were assembled from two-part episodes and released theatrically outside the United States. The Toei Supaidāman was a weekly series with one theatrical short attached to a 1978 Toei Manga Matsuri festival programme. All of them screened in cinemas somewhere, which is why they are on the ledger.

Spider-Man (1977)

Why it exists: CBS wanted a costumed hero to sit alongside The Incredible Hulk, and Spider-Man was the property they could licence. It aired as a pilot, drew strong numbers, and was reluctantly turned into a series that Stan Lee openly disliked.

On screen: A graduate student gains reflexes and adhesion from a lab accident and confronts a self-help guru hypnotising New Yorkers into a mass extortion scheme. There is no Goblin, no Ock, no rogues gallery — the budget bought stunt wirework and a van.

What it proved: That the costume reads on camera. Hammond's wall-crawling was performed practically, and the silhouette works. Everything after this is an argument about scale, not about whether the character is filmable.

Supaidāman (1978)

The deal: Marvel and Toei traded character rights for three years. Toei took Spider-Man and rebuilt him from scratch: Takuya Yamashiro, a motorcycle racer, receives blood from a dying alien warrior and inherits both a bracelet and a spaceship.

On screen: Weekly monster-of-the-week combat against the Iron Cross Army, escalating into the deployment of Leopardon — a giant transforming robot the size of a building. It is, structurally, a revenge story about a murdered father.

The legacy: This is not a footnote. Toei's producer took the giant-robot format directly from this show into Battle Fever J, which begat the Super Sentai lineage and, by extension, Power Rangers. Sony later canonised the character as Earth-51778 and put Leopardon on screen in Across the Spider-Verse.

Spider-Man (2002)

The gamble: Organic web-shooters, a fully armoured Goblin mask instead of a face, and a leading man nobody considered a movie star. Two of those three decisions still get argued about.

The scene everyone remembers: Not the Goblin fight. It is the upside-down kiss in the rain — a shot that works because the mask stays half-on, which is the whole character in one image.

The line that stuck: Uncle Ben's formulation of power and responsibility is delivered awkwardly, in a car park, as a lecture Peter is not listening to. That is exactly why it lands when it comes back.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

The peak: Still the argument-ending answer to what a superhero film can be. It won the Academy Award for Visual Effects and remains the only entry in this list whose central conflict is a man deciding whether the job is worth his own life.

The set piece: The elevated train sequence, where Raimi's horror instincts and his sentimentality finally shake hands. Peter stops the train, collapses, is carried by strangers, and is handed back his mask. The crowd protects him. No other film in the franchise earns that beat as cleanly.

The idea underneath: Otto Octavius is not evil. He is a man whose ambition outlives his judgement, and Molina plays the tragedy rather than the menace. It is the template every good comic-book villain since has been measured against.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

The overload: Raimi wanted Sandman and the Harry Osborn resolution. The studio wanted Venom. The film contains all three plus an amnesia subplot, and none of them are given room. It is the most instructive failure in the genre precisely because you can see the seams.

The bit that outlived the film: The symbiote-drunk strut down the sidewalk was intended as cringe comedy about a fundamentally uncool man. Two decades later it is a meme format with a longer cultural half-life than the movie itself.

The idea underneath: Forgiveness — of Sandman, of Harry, and of Peter by himself. It is a genuinely mature theme buried under a studio note. Raimi's planned fourth film, with John Malkovich circling the Vulture, was cancelled in 2010.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The reset: Mechanical web-shooters return, Peter is a competent engineer again, and the tone borrows from teen indie drama rather than pulp adventure. Garfield plays him as visibly bereaved rather than nerdy.

What it got right: The Parker–Stacy relationship is the most convincing romance in any of these films, and the in-suit voice — motormouthed, cruel to criminals, funny — is closer to the comics than anything Raimi attempted.

What it never resolved: The Richard and Mary Parker conspiracy. Deleted material and a heavily trailed "untold story" were largely excised in the edit, and the thread was quietly abandoned by the sequel.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

The overreach: Sony had announced Sinister Six and Venom spin-offs before this film opened. The result is a movie carrying three villains and a franchise roadmap in its hand luggage, and it buckles.

The fall: The clock tower. Gwen drops, Peter fires, the web catches her — and the whiplash breaks her neck anyway. The film cuts to the sound of the impact, and it is the single most brutal moment in fifty years of Spider-Man on film.

The aftermath: The planned third film was cancelled. Sony's universe collapsed, which forced the 2015 negotiation with Marvel Studios that produced the Tom Holland era. Garfield's own redemption arrived seven years later, catching MJ mid-air in No Way Home, and it plays because this scene exists.

The mentor problem

This era replaces Uncle Ben with Tony Stark, which solves a pacing problem and creates a thematic one. Peter's defining lesson stops being about ordinary moral obligation and becomes about living up to a billionaire. It takes three films and two deaths to unwind, and No Way Home is essentially a 148-minute correction that strips him of the suit, the money, the friends and the name.

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

The audition: Fifteen minutes of screen time to establish a character audiences had watched two other actors play within the previous decade. Holland is introduced in a Queens bedroom, talking too fast, in a suit made of goggles and sweatpants.

The tell: On the airport tarmac he is the only combatant enjoying himself. The film is about grown adults destroying a friendship; Peter is there because a man he admires asked him to come, and he does not understand what he is in the middle of.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

The genre swap: A John Hughes high-school picture wearing a superhero suit. The stakes are a decathlon trip and a homecoming dance, and the film is confident enough to let the Washington Monument sequence be about a lift shaft rather than a city.

The twist: Adrian Toomes opens the door. It is the best scare in any of these films, and it works because Keaton plays a salvage contractor who was put out of business by the Avengers — a villain with a legitimate grievance against the film's own premise.

The correction: Peter turns down Avengers membership at the end. It is the only time in this era he chooses smallness, and the following four years spend that choice.

Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019)

The promotion: Peter gets the Iron Spider suit, leaves the atmosphere, and is knighted an Avenger on a ring-shaped alien world. He is sixteen.

The cost: He dissolves in Stark's arms apologising for it. Five years pass for everyone else. He returns mid-sentence in a portal, fights a war he does not know has been running, and watches his surrogate father die — a sequence that only functions because of the specific rules Endgame sets for its time travel.

The knock-on: Every one of his classmates aged five years or none at all. The MCU never fully reckons with this, but Peter's isolation from here on is the residue of it.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

The inheritance: Peter is handed EDITH, an orbital weapons platform, by a dead man's will, and immediately gives it away to the first adult who is kind to him. Quentin Beck's entire scheme depends on a grieving teenager wanting permission to stop.

The cliffhanger: A doctored broadcast, a posthumous frame-up, and J. Jonah Jameson — J. K. Simmons, reprising the role from a different universe entirely — naming him on air. It is the cruellest final thirty seconds in the franchise.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

The stunt that worked: Maguire and Garfield return, and against every reasonable expectation the film uses them for something other than applause. Their scenes are about grief management — two older men talking a younger one out of committing a murder.

The price: May dies. The spell erases Peter from every memory on Earth. He ends the film in a bedsit, sewing his own suit, unknown, unfunded and unaccompanied — which is to say, he ends it as Spider-Man for the first time.

The scale: Roughly $1.9 billion worldwide during a pandemic, and the argument that closed the case on whether the multiverse could carry a mainstream audience.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

Standing: Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. Tom Holland returns opposite Zendaya's Michelle Jones and Jacob Batalon's Ned Leeds, with Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner and Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova.

The premise: Peter works full-time as Spider-Man in a city with no memory of Peter Parker, watching people he loved get on with lives he is no longer in. The threat is a presence nobody can see, working through other people's minds — and the film's most interesting move is the X-Men character Sadie Sink turns out to be playing.

The pivot: A street-level register, mutants entering the frame, and a Peter who ends the film biologically and emotionally different from the one who started it. We went into the format question in our piece on why the V-Max presentation is not what it claims to be.

What it sets up: The Bernthal pairing is the clearest signal yet of the tonal direction, and the closing scenes leave Spider-Man positioned for threats considerably above his previous weight class.

What a canon event actually is

Not fate, and not prophecy. The sequel's proposition is that certain traumas — a dead uncle, a dead police captain — recur across every Spider-Person's timeline, and that preventing one unravels the universe it belongs to. It converts the genre's most tired convention, the fridged loved one, into the antagonist. Miles's refusal is the plot.

Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

The rulebreak: Animating on twos, deliberate chromatic aberration, visible halftone dots and hand-drawn line work on top of 3D geometry. It looked wrong to everyone who saw the early tests, and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

The image: The leap of faith — frame inverted, Miles falling upward through glass towers. It is the single most imitated shot in animation since.

The thesis: Anyone can wear the mask. Delivered without sanctimony, and earned by a film that gives a middle-aged, divorced, out-of-shape Peter B. Parker equal dignity with a fourteen-year-old from Brooklyn.

Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

The escalation: Six distinct visual grammars in one film, one per universe, including a watercolour Earth-65 whose palette shifts with Gwen's mood. Around $690 million worldwide, on a film that opens with fifteen minutes of a drum solo.

The reversal: Miguel O'Hara is not wrong about the physics and is entirely wrong about the ethics, which is a harder antagonist to write than a Kingpin. The Spot, meanwhile, goes from joke to existential threat over ninety minutes without a single tonal misstep.

The cliff: Miles lands in the wrong universe, opposite an alternate version of himself, with his father's death scheduled. The film simply stops. Audiences have been waiting on the resolution since.

Beyond the Spider-Verse (2027)

Where it stands: Sony has the trilogy's conclusion booked for 18 June 2027, moved forward a week from an earlier date after a run of schedule changes. First-look material appeared at CinemaCon. Nothing about the plot has been confirmed beyond the obvious — Miles has a father to save and a Spider-Society to answer to.