All the Spider-Man movies, ranked from worst to best

This weekend, brings Tom Holland’s Peter Parker back to the big screen. Yet the film doesn’t just function as a continuation of the MCU version of the Spider-Man story. By plucking characters from other dimensions (a.k.a. franchises), it also operates like a kind of ultimate Spider-Man sequel, converging plot elements from three previous big-screen takes on Marvel’s friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. But though they now fit, through some IP-mashing wizard magic, into the same continuity, these various Spider-Man movies are not created equal. There is a spectrum of quality, reaching from the Empire State heights of one installment to the (relative) subterranean Lizard-lair depths of another. Keep reading to see how we’ve ranked the eight live-action Spider-Man movies, plus a single cartoon outlier that could give every Peter Parker out there a run for his superheroic money.

Just five years after Sam Raimi brought his Spider-Man trilogy to a messy conclusion (and only two after plans for a fourth film under his direction fell apart), Sony rebooted the franchise to retain the rights to Marvel’s flagship web-slinger. The Amazing Spider-Man runs through the whole origin story of the character yet again. Radioactive spider? Check. Death of Uncle Ben? Of course. Great power? Oh you better believe it comes with great responsibility. Andrew Garfield isn’t half-bad as a broodier, slightly slicker Peter Parker, skateboarding around New York before he finds a faster form of transit and actually delivering a few wisecracks (an essential element from the comics that Tobey Maguire’s version neglected to offer). The film’s greatest asset by a Manhattan mile is its most notable deviation from the previous franchise: The love interest isn’t Mary Jane but brainy Gwen Stacy, winningly portrayed by Emma Stone. Unfortunately, main adversary The Lizard is little more than a special effect, with none of the personality of a Green Goblin or Doc Ock. And personality, in the end, is what this overlong reset most fatally lacks: It plays like a straight remake of Raimi’s decade-earlier original with all the eccentric edges sanded down and scarcely a fraction of the joyous pop-blockbuster style.

Consensus holds that this is the worst of the Spider-Man movies, but we’ll give it a slight edge over its immediate predecessor on the grounds that it doesn’t just trot out half of the same plot beats as another movie. There are a few grace notes across its overstuffed 142 minutes, most of them courtesy of Garfield and Stone, who deepen the sparkling chemistry between Pete and Gwen. In their scenes together, you can definitely see the logic of rehiring (500) Days Of Summer writer-director Marc Webb, who occasionally steers the material in a charming romantic-comedy direction while also showing real improvement in the action set-piece department. But Amazing Spider-Man 2 is hobbled by the sheer volume of subplots it has to juggle; as our original review noted, it makes that task look “about as difficult as trying to balance a stack of graphic novels on a thin strand of gossamer.” Worst of all, the villains are a total wash: Jamie Foxx is swallowed whole by the lousy VFX that turns his scorned nerd scientist into human battery Electro, while Dane DeHaan’s chilly arrogance as sociopathic rich-kid Harry Osborn is wasted on a movie that tries to cram an arc of shattered friendship that the Raimi films explored over an entire trilogy into a handful of scenes. Amazing? Hardly.

Speaking of a movie with too much damn plot to cover, the final installment in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series is overburdened, like some bloated blockbuster illustration of the standard Peter Parker dilemma. It has a whopping three villains, only one of whom—Thomas Haden Church’s sentient storm of sediment, Sandman—Raimi actually seems interested in introducing. We also get the belated payoff of James Franco’s vengeful Harry Osborn following in his father’s footsteps, and the alien rage monster Venom, who the studio forced Raimi to add to the mix against his wishes. On top of this sinister three, Spider-Man 3 ladles relationship troubles with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), a competing love interest in the form of Bryce Dallas Howard’s barely-a-character Gwen Stacy, a revenge plot built around a retcon, a frankly laughable amnesia subplot to delay Harry’s own quest for vengeance, and Parker’s struggles with the alien symbiote that will eventually attach itself to professional rival Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) to become Venom for, like, 15 minutes. So, yes, Spider-Man 3 is a mess. Yet for all its evident strain, it does contain moments of poignant and oddball inspiration that edge it past the Webb films. Church, especially, is quite affecting as the Frankensteinian Sandman, who gets a majestic rebirth in the scene of his body struggling to reconstitute itself in the aftermath of scientific mishap. And ready the torches and pitchforks, because you can count us in the minority that thinks Maguire’s dorky flirtation with the dark side via finger guns and jazz dance is a comic highlight, not some low-point for modern superhero cinema.

The latest but almost certainly not the last of Spidey’s big-screen adventures is something of a greatest hits package, twisting up the continuity of the current Tom Holland incarnation of the character with that of the two series that came before it—a shameless stab at a live-action Spider-Verse that somehow counts as both the movie’s greatest source of inspiration and maybe its ultimate limitation. On the one hand, it’s fun to see these actors reprise their old roles through a plot that plucks familiar faces from the cross-franchise multiverse: Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina summon some of that old scenery-chewing mojo as the quintessential heavies of the Raimi era, and the climax is a crowd-pleasing collision of personalities that mostly deserves the roars of applause it’s going to earn this weekend. On the other hand, the smaller, teen-comedy charms of the Holland Spider-Man era are largely relegated to the first act, before the plot is completely hijacked by its high-concept IP mashup strategy and by scenes that will only mean anything to people who have also seen the Raimi and Webb films. In the end, No Way Home finds some affecting intersection points on the web of Spider-Men past and present, even if it’s hard not to pine at least a little for a Spider-Man vehicle less chained to the events of other movies, Marvel or Sony.

Will Tom Holland’s Spider-Man ever escape the shadow of other superheroes? Even in death, Tony Stark looms large over Far From Home, the second supposed solo vehicle for the Holland version of Spidey. The gadgets, the villain, the dramatic motivations—all labor to position teenage Peter as Iron Man Jr., a creative direction perhaps shaped by the relationship between uneasy corporate collaborators Marvel and Sony. Beneath all that elegiac MCU crossover stuff, though, this is a largely charming example of old-school Spider-Man storytelling, with Parker increasingly struggling to balance the Spider and Man sides of his life on a European study-abroad trip. The romantic-comedy elements with MJ (Zendaya) are touching and funny, and though the big bad here is intrinsically linked to Stark (again!), the ruse he pulls on Parker feels true to the superhero’s crisis of dual identities—his desire to have a real life outside of skyscraper swinging. Also, the reveal of that adversary is truly a hoot, offering an actor once considered for the iconic red suit himself a consolatory spot in the hammy rogues gallery.

Tom Holland’s second turn in the spandex (after his delightful debut in Captain America: Civil War) suffers from the same crossover obligations as the two films that followed. Which is to say, the worst thing about it is that it has to be a Marvel movie. Thankfully, it’s also a rather good Spider-Man movie, one that dispenses (thank Odin!) with another take on the origin story, even as it returns the character to his roots as a high school student still trying to figure out the whole work-life balance thing. Holland is a wonderfully adolescent hero, maybe the first actor who’s made Peter look and behave like an actual kid, immature and confused and vulnerable. And the movie nods to decades of back-issue source material by turning the villain, Michael Keaton’s embittered tech developer The Vulture, into an adult authority figure from his “normal” life. The car ride to the dance, a juicy bit of underplayed menace on Keaton’s part, is among the finest showdowns in the cinematic Spidey canon, despite a total absence of web slinging. With better action and a few less moments designed to situate this in the larger MCU portfolio (seriously, do we really need that many scenes with Happy Hogan?), Homecoming would be an instant classic. As is, it’s still a strong kickoff for this age of Spider spectaculars.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man plainly hails from a simpler time for superhero blockbusters and a very complicated time for national identity. There are elements that date the movie: the special effects; the endearingly corny post-9/11 appeals to NYC solidarity; Macy Gray. But there’s also something timeless about Raimi’s bright, elastic approximation of an exaggerated comic-book world—a quality that extends from the big colors and slingshot camerawork to the perfect human-cartoon casting of J.K. Simmons as bloviating newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. The, ahem, sticking point for a lot of diehard Spidey fans remains Tobey Maguire, who plays Peter Parker as less of a classic introverted geek than an alien doing a strange impression of human interaction. Nonetheless, Raimi smartly roots the movie in his awkwardness, getting at some of the essential appeal of the character as a tragically uncool kid; when he becomes Spider-Man—in a series of scenes that give the origin-story boilerplate stuff a real shot in the arm—the wish-fulfillment fantasy of it shines brighter, even as we’re never allowed to forget that it’s the same stammering space cadet under the mask. What really takes Spider-Man over the top is Willem Dafoe’s literally finger-licking turn as the Green Goblin, still one of the most enjoyably outsized renderings of cackling supervillain menace yet put on the big screen.

It’s difficult to imagine that No Way Home will spark the kind of mass joy inspired by the last Spider-Man movie to drop characters from other dimensions into a single bustling New York. Sony’s idiosyncratically animated adventure still feels like something of a minor miracle: a superhero extravaganza that’s both breathlessly referential and steeped in its own emotional reality, thanks to a plot that dual functions as a moving introduction to that other teenage Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and a kaleidoscopic ensemble comedy of geeky comic-book lore. Certainly, we’ve never seen a funnier version of this material on screen, with the famous Lord/Miller school of zinger-heavy cartoon shenanigans deployed to satirize the reigning trends in current superhero cinema, from endlessly rebooted continuities to the bloated casts of extended universes. As with the Holland films, one can’t help but love the main character enough to wonder if he deserved a less crowded showcase. (Which is to say: Here’s hoping we eventually just get a Miles Morales movie, no Spider-Verse required.) But it would be churlish to complain about such a wonderfully creative and affectionate tribute to Spider-Man mythology—especially one whose every computer generated image looks this beautiful.

Being Spider-Man sucks. That’s maybe the essential truth of this decades-old character, an honest kid who knows he’s been handed an incredible gift and that he has to use it for the greater good, no matter the havoc it wreaks on his life. Spider-Man can save the city, but he can’t always save his relationships or his job or his grades. Sam Raimi understands that core tenet of the hero, and he puts it at the very center of his glorious sequel, which soulfully expands on its predecessor in just about every way. The effects and action set-pieces are better. The villain, played by a committed Alfred Molina, is every bit as memorable and entertaining as Dafoe’s Goblin. And Raimi lets even more of his cracked horror-auteur imagination peek through the big-budget framework, most exquisitely in an operating-room sequence that calls back to his Evil Dead roots. Mostly, though, what he does is invest seriously in the fundamental dilemma of the character, with a vital assist from screenwriter Alvin Sargent and the novelist (and comic-book enthusiast) Michael Chabon. The irony is that he emerges with a movie about how hard it is to balance the two sides of Parker’s life that achieves that balance gracefully. It puts Spider-Man 2 at the top of not just this ranking but very possibly a larger one devoted to all movies pulled from the brightly colored panels of a Marvel comic book.