Before Tobey and Kirsten, the leads of superhero movies looked like proper grown-ups Christopher Reeve, Michael Keaton, Margot Kidder, and Kim Basinger. If you saw this movie in the theater in 2002, then you know what I’m talking about. Some might say the true Sam Raimi masterpiece is 2004’s Spider-Man 2, but it’s hard to really argue with the original.Īlthough Tobey Maquire and Kirsten Dunst don’t seem like they’re playing high school kids now, at the time, seeing actors that looked like those two in a mainstream superhero movie was a revelation. But, overall, despite the movie feeling almost closer to a nineties movie than anything made in the 21st century, the special effects and straightforward origin story still work incredibly well. Not all the jokes land the way they did in 2002, including a few unfortunate comments from Spidey during that wrestling match with Bonesaw (the late Randy Savage). The charm and humor of Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe, and the rest of the cast is undeniable. Before 9/11, many Americans saw the country as Superman, after 9/11, the scrappier, more DIY Spider-Man seemed more fitting, and appropriately, less sanctimonious. As many critics and commentators pointed out, Spider-Man captured the mood of the moviegoing culture like no-other blockbuster before it, simply because of when it came out. In some ways, the not-quite-erasure of the World Trade Center is the biggest metaphor for what Spider-Man felt like at the time. According to some reports, when this happened, audiences cheered. The scene was apparently never meant to be the movie, but in the final cut, we still do see some shots of the twin towers in the background. Obviously, even though the now-classic film hit theaters in 2002, the Sam Raimi-directed flick was filmed before the events of 9/11. The earliest trailers for the 2002 film Spider-Man showed the titular web-slinger catching a helicopter in a giant net spun between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Here’s why, plus, where to stream it right now. The movie came out on May 3, 2002, and we’re still caught in its web. Twenty years ago, before the MCU, before streaming TV, and before a mainstream cultural obsession with superhero crossovers, one film changed everything: the 2002 movie simply titled Spider-Man.

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