We’ve seen Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire play Spider-Man in their own standalone universes before the character was canonized as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Sam Raimi-led franchise generally receiving top marks from fans and critics.
Raimi-Verse and Webb-Verse focused on providing an origin story for Peter Parker and offered various interpretations of the phrase “great responsibility”. Even so, the characters’ methods of creating webs varied – Andrew Garfield’s character created his webs artificially, while Toby Maguire’s Peter used organic webs.
The characters’ personalities also varied, with Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker being much more confident and witty. On the other side, Tobey Maguire’s portrayal was much more nerdy and sensitive, his jokes as a crawler being quite few but still fun.
In a recent interview for Sean O’Connell’s Spider-Man With Great Power book, Captain America: Civil War author Christopher Markus and No Way Home director Jon Watts discussed whether if Peter Parker had acquired his superhuman abilities from a radioactive spider. Holland’s Spidey took a very different path from its two predecessors. Jon Watts explains how Tom’s Peter acquired his abilities.
Jon Watts on Spidey’s origins
Jon Watts on the set of Spider-Man No Way Home
Markus said that although “they never talked about it”, he “thinks Peter was bitten by a radioactive spider during a field trip.”
The filmmaker of all of Holland’s independent Spidey films, Jon Watts, also admitted that he only had “a few sorts of sketchy concepts” and nothing more.
He felt that skipping the spider bite scene was “just brilliant”, as it allowed Peter’s origin story to “deal with the repercussions more”:
The origin of the MCU’s Spider-Man
Tom Holland
Even though the incident is never mentioned in the MCU, it’s safe to infer that Spider-Man really was bitten by a radioactive spider at some point. But what are the specifics?
Was it on a field trip like in his comic book origin stories and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, or was it more like Into the Spider-Verse, where Miles is bitten by a rogue experimental spider?
