Spider-Man stories offer a tempting fantasy: Wouldn’t it be great, if when friends invite you to places, you secretly had a good excuse for why you don’t show up? But being Spider-Man also has a downside, in the form of the occasional disaster that ends the lives of your loved ones.

Who will die in Spider-Man: Brand New Day? Ned? MJ? Peter himself? We’re guessing none of them, but whatever does happen, we hope it makes more sense than some of the deaths these movies have forced on us in the past.

Thsi list contains major spoilers for all the Spider-Man movies up to and including No Way Home.

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Uncle Ben, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ (2012)

The 2012 Spider-Man reboot retold a story the audience already knew, so it made sense to throw in a few twists. With Uncle Ben’s murder, these changes took an especially odd route, seemingly trying to convince us Ben is responsible for his own death.

A thief leaves a store, and the owner tells passersby to stop him. Ben (Martin Sheen) is near, and unlike in some versions of the story, the thief does not confront him. The thief bumps into pedestrians while fleeing then trips and falls. Watching the scene is quite disorienting, because it looks like someone violently pushes someone else, and you’d think the thief is doing the pushing, but no: The thief is the one who falls. A gun drops from his coat, and he rushes to retrieve it.

Ben dives for it as well. We’d pause this article to explain why you should never do this, but the movie does a better job at that than we could because the two now struggle, and it ends with Ben shot to death. Notably, the thief wasn’t planning on shooting anyone before. This gunshot may be accidental, and if it isn’t, a lawyer might argue it’s self-defense, as the thief’s opponent had his hands on a gun.

Earlier, during the robbery, the thief never took out the weapon. He stretched and took cash from the register when the clerk’s back was turned. He didn’t empty the whole register but just took whatever handful of cash he could grab in an instant. Then, on the way out, he threw to Peter (Andrew Garfield) the bottle of chocolate milk that the boy couldn’t afford. Of course, none of that makes robbery okay, but the movie goes out of its way to try to convince us this thief isn’t such a bad guy.

This all seemingly sets up Pete later catching up with the thief and having some kind of epiphany about how this whole thing went down. That doesn’t happen. Peter becomes Spider-Man to find the killer, then the movie abandons this subplot and never returns to it. So, we’re just left remembering that this death was extremely avoidable — not just avoidable by Peter intervening but more immediately avoidable by Ben declining to intervene. We remember: Don’t be Ben. Don’t be a hero. It hurts you and helps no one. That’s quite a message, from a superhero movie.

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Harry Osborn, ‘Spider-Man 3’ (2007)

Imave via Sony

Harry (James Franco) is a villain for much of Spider-Man 3, till he agrees to team up with Peter (Tobey Maguire) at the end to save Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst). Redemption means death, which here comes in the form of Harry saving Peter from the goblin glider wielded by Venom (Topher Grace).

Harry is face-down a dozen yards away when Venom jumps into the air and starts crashing down toward an immobile Pete. In less time than it would take Peter to break free and flinch out of the way (something Pete successfully does a few seconds later), Harry gets up, runs in front of Peter, and turns around. He ends up facing Peter as the glider’s spikes shoot through his own chest.

Some fans, watching the scene frame-by-frame, are convinced Harry’s move here is impossible. We’re not sure about that, but it certainly seems like a strange choice on his part, one that shouldn’t actually save Pete’s life. If those spikes go right through Harry, as we see they do, his body shouldn’t slow the glider down to a stop. Venom should keep on pushing and go right on driving it straight into Peter. When a glider went through the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) in the first Spider-Man movie, the spikes went clear through his body and also went several inches into the brick wall behind him.

Given the superhuman reflexes of everyone involved, Harry would have had a lot more luck trying to knock Venom out of the way, instead of becoming a human shield. In fact, Harry did just that 40 seconds earlier, throwing bladed pumpkin bombs at Venom the last time Peter was moments from death. If the script didn’t want this solution to be available, and wanted Harry to sacrifice himself, maybe they shouldn’t have written him throwing bombs successfully earlier in the very same scene.

Then again, maybe Harry should have done nothing at all. The end of Spider-Man: No Way Home showed us that, against all expectations, Tobey’s Spider-Man has the power to shrug off all stab wounds, because his heart is pure.

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Aunt May, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ (2021)

Imave via Walt Disney Pictures

The scene where Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) dies in No Way Home is very moving. The more familiar you are with how these movies work, the harder it hits. When she gets up after being injured and swears she’s all right, that’s when the savvy viewer truly starts fearing she’s doomed. When she says those words, “With great power, there must also come great responsibility,” that’s when we know she has just seconds left. Later, when Peter (Tom Holland) talks with versions of himself from other universes, they exchange stories of Uncle Ben sharing similar words with them.

“Maybe she didn’t die for nothing, Peter,” says Tobey’s Spider-Man. So, her death isn’t simply a setback the hero must move past (like so many deaths, such as Gwen Stacy’s). It’s a purposeful event that serves to teach Pete a lesson. The only problem is it teaches the opposite lesson from the one May’s words do.

The way Uncle Ben’s death works in these stories (even in The Amazing Spider-Man’s weird take on it), Spider-Man could do the noble thing, and tragedy ensues because he does not. Here, Spider-Man could do the noble thing (attempting to redeem all those villains), and tragedy ensues because he does. May’s last words might tell Pete that he did the right thing, but her dying, like Ben’s dying, shows he chose poorly.

The whole plot teaches the audience it’s dangerous to try to rehabilitate criminals. That’s the opposite of the message the movie intends. We might even call it misleading anti-rehabilitation propaganda, because in real life, the choice isn’t between killing criminals and keeping them in your aunt’s apartment, where they will kill her.

Anyway, we always thought the line about power and responsibility meant that you must sacrifice your own comfort to protect the innocent, not that you must sacrifice the innocent to protect the guilty. Also, we figured Peter shouldn’t need to learn about power and responsibility this many years into his career, much less need a mentor to die to teach it to him. He’s already willingly put his own life on the line many times. He’s also already had a mentor die in front of him.

The very first time we meet Peter, in Captain America: Civil War, Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) asks him why he’s chosen the hero life. Pete replies, “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you.” That’s him paraphrasing the famous power-responsibility line, letting us know he’s already internalized that lesson. It also telegraphs to us that they were skipping past the origin story this time and starting off with a fully formed Spider-Man. Well, it turned out they were giving us an origin story after all, except rather sticking it in one movie, they stretched it out over six.

Release Date

December 17, 2021

Runtime

148 minutes

Writers

Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers