With Great Power: How Spider-Man Conquered Hollywood during the Golden Age of Comic Book Blockbusters

This is the Golden Age of comic-book blockbusters.

Since his introduction in August 1962, Spider-Man’s pop culture reach has extended from comic books and clothing to video games, toys, and television shows. His strongest impact, however, is in the feature-film realm, where eight different Spider-Man movies collectively boast more than $7.2 billion in worldwide tickets sold.

If Hollywood had a superhero throne, Spider-Man would be sitting on it. Of the five highest-grossing film franchises in Hollywood history, Spider-Man now plays a pivotal role in three: the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the four-film Avengers franchise; and the Spider-Man series. This ranks the character ahead of James Bond, the Transformers, every on-screen Batman, and Peter Jackson’s complete Tolkien series in Hollywood’s box-office hierarchy.

Marvel’s wall-crawler has come a long way since his earliest days, but his cinematic journey has yet to be documented. Unusual, since Spider-Man’s Hollywood history is littered with A-list names (such as James Cameron and Leonardo DiCaprio), behind-the-scenes squabbles, franchise reboots, and Tom Holland preventing Disney from booting Spidey out of the MCU. The prized creation of Marvel guru Stan Lee has helped create and cultivate the current Golden Age of comic-book blockbusters, and lessons learned on the Spider-Man franchises are applied to all comic-book movies today.

Veteran film reporter and author Sean O'Connell uses his exclusive access to directors, actors, producers, and screenwriters to get the inside angles on Spider-Man’s climb to the top of the superhero heap in With Great Power.