Why 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Could Be The Most Important Superhero Film Of All Time.

Ahead of the much anticipated release of Spider-Man: No Way Home this Wednesday, I wanted to look at why I think this film has the ability to become the most influential and important superhero film of all time. That may seem like a bold statement, but with all it stands to achieve and showcase, I think it will end up giving Avengers: Endgame a run for its money in terms of scale and ambition, and could end up being one of the most defining films of the genre.

As a film genre, the superhero film has arguably evolved more than any other in the last number of years. Originally being seen as just a distant, low-brow relative of the action film for kids, the genre has now become a box office mainstay attracting some of the most lucrative and bankable Hollywood actors, writers and directors. While the genre still has its critics (*cough* Martin Scorsese *cough*), it cannot be denied that superhero films have had a prominent hold on pop culture and the film industry for a number of years now. Given all their success now, it's hard to believe that there was once a time in which a film about a New York teenager who gets superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider was seen as a big risk for a studio to take. The runaway success of the MCU since it's inception in 2008 would've been inconceivable when the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy was released in the early 2000s. Having grown in success and popularity, and continuously proving how lucrative it is at the box office, the genre now has the ability to expand itself in ways that previously never would've been thought possible. After years of being divided amongst a number of Hollywood's major film studios, Disney now owns the rights to the majority of Marvel's most popular characters, making crossovers amongst franchises all the more possible.

Now, with No Way Home poised to position villains from all three Spider-Man iterations together on the big screen for the first time, the film has the ability to do something other superhero films could only dream of up to this point; unite all of the individual franchises in a way which only the rich comic book history has thus far been able to do.

For many years, the film rights to some of Marvel Comics most popular properties has been, for lack of a better term, a bit of a hot mess. Spanning across several different studios and with little to no correlation in how they were divided, for a long time securing enough heros to fill a whole roster in a superhero film seemed implausible. But with the House of Mouse’s ever expanding hold on the entertainment industry seeing them buy out most of their competitors in the last 5 years, for the first time ever Marvel Studios have access to majority of their most lucrative comic book franchises and characters.

After buying Fox in 2019, Disney acquired the rights to the X-Men, Deadpool and Fantastic Four franchises. And after a rough couple of months in the summer of that same year, Marvel Studios were able to reach a deal with Sony which would allow Tom Holland's Spider-Man to see out his trilogy of films within the MCU. Suddenly, what once seemed a total implausibility now had an actual chance of happening. There is a world in which the X-Men and Avengers could team up and interact.

Not only did they now how the rights to the characters, but with Marvel's Disney+ original series WandaVision and Loki setting up the existence of a multiverse within the MCU, Marvel Studios now had their characters, and a means through which they can introduce them into the fabric of the MCU. The existence of a portal between different universes (which has conveniently just been opened by some character's messing around with the fabric of reality), gives the MCU (somewhat) solid grounding to explain why these characters previously had not existed, or at least why their existence hadn't been known. The multiverse paves the way not only for characters from different Marvel franchises to interact, but also for different versions of the same character to team-up; and Spider-Man: No Way Home will be the first film to test this out with audiences.

Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire to their credit have done a valiant effort of trying to dispel rumours of their appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but with the existence of their respective filmic villains in the film’s first trailer, and rather official looking leaks of apparent scenes of the three from the film; the rumour is not going away. Either it’s the worst kept secret in Hollywood or fans are lining themselves up for bitter disappointment in the coming days, but with mounting evidence suggesting that a crossover between all three Spider-Men is on the horizon, its hard to imagine the latter being the case. While previous Avengers films have been wildly ambitious in the way they've attempted to weave vast numbers of heroes together onto one screen, that pales in comparison to linking three distinctly different iterations of the same character spanning twenty years.

Despite being the third film in the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy, and the franchise's reputation for less than stellar third outings; Spider-Man: No Way Home has the potential to be one of the most important and influential superhero films ever made for how it tees up the rest of the MCU going forward, and opens the door for more cross franchise integration of characters. If the film is the runaway success early reviews and fan response are suggesting that it is, we could be in for Endgame level box office returns and a franchise future in which anything is possible, and where almost all of Marvel Comics' most popular characters can exist together as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had intended.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is in cinemas December 15th.