As of writing, the latest Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, has just spent its second week at the top of the box-office in the United States and Canada. None of the trades have mentioned this, but it is the first movie to do so since Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 back in 2007. Put differently, it had been 12 years since a movie featuring Spider-Man had spent two weeks as America's number 1 movie. Such was the stink left by not only Spider-Man 3 but the two attempts Sony made in the years that followed to erase that film from people's memory, that Spider-Man went from a box-office champion to an also-ran. Consider: in May of 2014, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, in only its second weekend, was booted out of the top spot by Seth Rogen's and Zac Efron's Neighbors. I mean, Neighbors, for God's sake.
Given his downward box-office trajectory, therefore, folding Spidey into the Marvel Cinematic Universe was pretty much the only way that Sony Pictures could have saved the character, and what better way was there to ensure his proper integration into the MCU than to hitch Peter Parker's star to the brightest one in that particular universe, i.e. that of Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man? The logic of the move was airtight.
The execution, not so much.
For Spidey's debut, Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel brain trust opted to have him join Tony Stark's faction of squabbling Avengers in Captain America: Civil War, a film only very loosely-based on Mark Millar's and Steve McNiven's 2006 comic in which an adult Peter Parker also sided with Iron Man against Captain America over a significant clash of beliefs. In the film, their ideological divide was differently framed, but more crucially, so was Peter Parker: he went from being the married twentysomething of the comics to a fifteen-year-old high school kid whom Tony found on Youtube catching a car and whom he then recruited to fight a couple of super soldiers, both of whom were extremely formidable, and one of whom was a confirmed killer. This was compounded by the fact that Tony essentially blackmailed Peter ("I'd better tell Aunt Hottie...") into agreeing to go with him. There was no preexisting relationship here; Tony, who was operating at the time under the apparent auspices of the United Nations, found some kid online whom he didn't know from Adam and recruited him to go toe-to-toe with Captain America. Tweak the circumstances a bit, and Tony's basically a war criminal. Granted, they weren't fighting a war (title of the film notwithstanding) and Cap didn't kill Peter, but he sure as hell could have, considering he dropped a freaking airport gangplank on him and it was, at minimum, a severe case of child endangerment.
As much as I enjoyed Civil War, this little aspect of the plot bothered me so much that up until today, when I give lectures on International Humanitarian Law to security forces, as an ice-breaker I always include slides of Iron Man and Spider-Man just to introduce the violation of recruiting children to fight in armed conflict. It felt like a necessary evil, though, and Tony did sort of end up "punished" at the end of that movie, so I could still forgive Marvel this strange, somewhat off-putting decision.
When Tony tried to recruit Peter into the Avengers at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming, the moment is played for laughs, and premium is placed on the fact that Peter turns him down, but I still found the moment rather irksome. It's Peter who's acting like the mature adult at the end of that movie, doing the right thing and refusing, basically at Tony's expense, but as annoying as that was, it was still something I could live with, because for all its flaws I quite enjoyed Homecoming, which brought my beloved Spidey back from the yawning abyss into which Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach and their hapless sock-puppet director had plunged him.
Fortunately, in the two movies that followed, Tony took a break from his grossly improper relationship with Peter.
Tony was not to blame for what happened to Peter in Avengers: Infinity War. With Thanos' infamous snap being completely random in its effects, and considering the number of Peter's friends and community who got "dusted," it's reasonable to suppose that if Tony had never even met Peter the same fate would have befallen him and, if Tony had never met Peter, he never would have felt the guilt that impelled him, in Avengers: Endgame, to help Cap undo what Thanos had done. So Tony's heroism in those movies, especially as exemplified by his sacrifice, remains undiminished.
And then, we come to Spider-Man: Far From Home, and it's Civil War all over again.
Now, to be clear, I have no issue whatsoever with Tony's disgruntled employees being revealed as the bad guys, including classic Spidey bad guy Mysterio as played by Jake Gyllenhaal. While I found Mysterio's second-act exposition a tad gratuitous, I actually thought the twist (which anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with Spider-Man could see coming from a mile away) was pretty well-played and that it made sense in the context of the MCU.
No, I took issue with the fact that the late Tony entrusted Peter with what is effectively a weapon of mass destruction in the form of the "E.D.I.T.H." glasses. This is particularly galling when I consider that he has a number of other people in his circle, like his widow Pepper Potts, his trusted friend and Man Friday Happy Hogan, or any of his surviving Avengers teammates like the Hulk or Hawkeye to whom he could have entrusted the glasses instead. I mean, of COURSE Peter would screw up handling E.D.I.T.H.; he's a sixteen-year-old kid to whom the ramifications of this device were not properly explained.
When one thinks about it, Spider-Man wasn't at all responsible for a lot of the chaos that went down in Far From Home. It wasn't his fault, for example, that faux-Nick Fury, a.k.a. Talos the Skrull, got suckered by Mysterio's CGI trickery, which is supremely ironic considering that fooling people is supposed to be the Skrulls' stock-in-trade. If Peter made a mistake entrusting Mysterio with E.D.I.T.H., it was in no small part because faux-Fury had already given Mysterio the all-clear and basically ordered Peter to unmask in front of him, a decision that came back to bite Peter on the ass in the mid-credits sequence. Peter's bad decision basically just compounded several worse ones that had already been made by Talos and more importantly, by Tony Stark. In the end, Peter really did save the day, but the only reason he even had to in the first place was that the adults in the film had screwed up really badly, including the dead one.
Make no mistake: I genuinely enjoyed Spider-Man: Far From Home. Of the five MCU movies in which Peter Parker has appeared, it's the one that feels truest to the character. With the last-gasp cameo from J. Jonah Jameson, the film is also taking the character back to places he hasn't been since Tobey Maguire was wearing the tights. If Sony and Marvel, whose current deal regarding the use of Spidey ends with this film, decide to extend their collaboration, this franchise will be all the better for it.
I just hope they finally leave Tony Stark alone. I mean, the guy's dead. There's no need to posthumously make him an idiot, too.
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