Ranking every live-action Spider-Man from worst to best
When Spider-Man: No Way Home hit theatres in 2021 and featured not just Tom Holland’s Sony iteration of Spider-Man, but Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s versions as well, the entire global Spider-Man fandom was set alight. It was a monumental and somewhat meta moment for the superhero genre, not just acknowledging its forerunners, but celebrating them as well.
It brought in not just the previous Spider-Men, but some of his iconic villains too, rounding up the best of the hero’s rogues’ gallery and allowing audiences to re-experience the pleasure that was Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin and Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus, to name but a few. It was a commemoration of one of Marvel’s most enduring characters, who has delighted children and adults alike for over 60 years.
Deftly maintaining a precarious balancing act between pure, unashamed fan service and delivering an actually cohesive and organic plot, director Jon Watts was deservedly praised for delivering an outstanding third entry to the MCU series that equally continued the journey of the newest Spider-Man whilst also showing love to the predecessors that came before him.
Watts hadn’t shown love to all his predecessors, however. There are also three from the previous century, perhaps less well-known, but who, whether they deserve it or not, must be ranked amongst all others for the reigning title of the definitive live-action Spider-Man.
Ranking every live-action Spider-Man:
6. Danny Seagren / Spidey Super Stories, Electric Company (1974)
It feels unfair to give Danny Seagren’s Spider-Man such a low ranking considering the handicap his version was given. On the Spidey Super Stories segment of the 1970s educational children’s TV show Electric Company, audiences were treated to a completely mute Spider-Man who was more concerned with educating children than vigilantism.
A noble cause indeed, but an overall terrible depiction of the web-slinging hero as he appears in the comics. To make matters worse, he spoke in the comic book ‘captions’, an attempt to hark back to his comic book origins whilst also encouraging children to read, giving us very little to assess his Spidey on. As the theme song said, “Spider-Man, nobody knows who you are!”
5. Nicholas Hammond / The Amazing Spider-Man (1977)
Nicholas Hammond publicly expressed his disappointment that he wasn’t included in No Way Home. For the older fans, I’m sure many were as well; Hammond would have been a lot of people’s first introduction to a live-action Spider-Man.
As camp and flamboyant as Adam West’s Batman show that came nearly ten years prior, The Amazing Spider-Man was very much of its time. Nevertheless, it showed us the superhero fighting crime, webbing up bad guys, and some actually quite impressive acrobatics of Spidey jumping and sticking to the ceiling. Plus, it had the funkiest Spidey soundtrack to date.
4. Shinji Tōdō / Supaidāman (1978)
If it seems like the ranking corresponds to the release date, you’d be right. Up until this point, it really was simply a case of each version taking the character that extra bit more seriously and tiny advancements in technology allowing the comic-book character to be more realistically depicted on screen.
With Supaidāman, however, realism gets completely blown out of the window, but it’s just so absurdly fun because this Eastern take on the wall-crawler is about as loose as it gets. Shinji Tōdō’s Spider-Man receives his powers not from a radioactive spider but from the blood transfusion of an alien from Planet Spider. The series had such a cult following that we will see the return of Supaidāman in the upcoming Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
3. Andrew Garfield / The Amazing Spider-Man 1-2 (2012-2014)
Here’s where things get controversial. Whilst Andrew Garfield’s reprisal as Peter Parker in No Way Home was arguably the greatest of the trio and rightly celebrated as a triumphant return to the role for the actor, there’s less to be said about the films.
The angsty, skateboarding take on the web-slinger felt particularly out of character; he was objectively cool, making it hard to believe that his version was a loser without the mask. Despite nailing the snappiness of the character when in costume, Garfield’s Spider-Man falls short, making The Amazing Spider-Man the weaker of modern films.
2. Tobey Maguire / Spider-Man 1-3 (2002 – 2007)
Pure, unabashed nostalgia nearly pushed this one to the top; the Spider-Man films from director Sam Raimi would have been the millennials’ first live-action Spidey and, therefore, the definitive one. The films hold up remarkably well today, better even than some of the MCU ones, and the villains throughout the series proved so colourful and charismatic that two of them played key roles in No Way Home.
From the moment the spider bites him, Tobey Maguire is a delight to watch and perfectly captures both Parker’s awkward social ineptness with Spidey’s wittiness. The only problem, really, was that he was just that slightly bit too old for the role. If they’d committed to making it a Spider-Man several years down the line rather than still in college, it might just have been perfect.
1. Tom Holland / Spider-Man: Home Trilogy (2017-2021)
Whilst perhaps not in the best Spider-Man films, Tom Holland is the best live-action Spider-Man we’ve ever had. At the perfect age, voice still squeaking with hormones and yet to understand the true meaning of “great responsibility”, his version was the closest thing to the comics fans had got.
From his introduction in Captain America: Civil War right through to No Way Home, we saw an evolution and growth of character on a scope unseen before. We grew alongside him, from high-school prom anxiety to grieving the loss of a beloved guardian, and as the scale of the threat grew with each film, we felt more and more confident that Spider-Man had learned the tools to deal with it.