Later this month, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will hit theaters as the ninth live action standalone Spider-Man film since 2002. Dustin Kidd, professor of sociology at Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts who studies pop culture, discusses why the hero continues to resonate with audiences. 

For more than 60 years, Peter Parker/Spider-Man has taken pride in the role he occupies as a friendly neighborhood superhero. Across those six decades, the character has come to occupy another important role as a global, pop culture sensation. 

For context, consider that the Spider-Man film franchise is the second-highest grossing film franchise of all time, collectively grossing more than $11 billion worldwide. That number will soon balloon even further as later this month, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will hit theaters as the ninth live-action standalone Spider-Man film since 2002. 

The hero averages 5 million internet searches every month. And, in the past three years alone, YouTube videos that feature the web-slinger have garnered 189 billion views. 

Dustin Kidd, professor of sociology at Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts, studies popular culture and social media and is the author of the books Pop Culture Freaks and Social Media Freaks. His research examines film, television, fiction, social media, comics, video games, music and the arts, focusing on both inequalities and the ways marginalized groups use media to challenge those inequalities. 

While he has studied Spider-Man from an academic standpoint, he also is a huge fan of the character and all its lore. 

Temple Now caught up with Kidd ahead of the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day to gain his thoughts on why the character has been able to stand the test of time, still possessing what seems to be unflappable popularity over all these years. 

Temple Now: The summer movie season is upon us, and once again, it looks like the box office will be dominated by Spider-Man, as the upcoming movie is projected to draw nearly $200 million during its opening weekend. While some superheroes have faded in popularity over the years, Spider-Man seems to pretty much unflappable. Why has he resonated with audiences so much for more than 60 years now. 

Dustin Kidd: If you look back at Spider-Man’s very first appearance in “Amazing Fantasy No. 15,” what stands out is that he was the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. And, so in that sense, he was very different from other superheroes who had this very enormous presence where they controlled an entire city, had great wealth or came from across the universe. This was just a guy in your neighborhood who cares about the other kids in his high school (even when they didn't care about him) and was looking out for their best interests. 

And, in the movies, we see that, too, especially in the initial Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield films. Essentially, Spider-Man as a character keeps pulling you back to this idea that he’s just your average Joe, who happens to have these special powers because of a bizarre interaction with a spider. The actual interaction changes a bit from one version of the story to another, but the details don't matter that much. He still has his spidey senses (or “spidey tingles”) and his webbing. And, in some versions, he creates his webbing and in others, he gets it naturally, but again, that does not really matter. It’s the friendly neighborhood aspect that makes him really stand out, and that is consistent across every piece of popular culture, whether it be a comic, cartoon or movie. 

TN: While Spider-Man as a character goes back to 1962, he really started to permeate into popular culture in 1967 when the first cartoon was produced. Even now, the theme song of the show is one of the most iconic aspects of the character. Since then, his presence as a pop culture icon has only further grown. How come? 

Kidd: The comic books were also very popular to a particular audience but not necessarily for a broader audience. What they have done well is have the comics serve as almost research and development for the pop culture industry. They leverage those into animation or live-action films and then have been able to gain wider and wider audiences. 

In a way, the cartoons and live action movies have then been used to build audiences for the comic books. That is significant, too, because comic books can feel like an impenetrable universe, but when you distill it down to just a season of an animated show or a film, it’s a bit more digestible. That also then pulls in a lot more people, who might then become readers of the comics. A large portion of Spider-Man fans have not been introduced to the character through comics. Rather, they became fans of the character through a cartoon or film, and that speaks to just how significant his impact has been throughout the years. 

TN: This upcoming film will be the ninth live-action Spider-Man film. The only hero with more is Batman. So, is there an end in sight, or do you suspect we will be watching Spider-Man movies for years to come? 

Kidd: I think there’s a persistence to the character, and there’s a deeply held investment in the character. The way that the character has been structured, and this is true of all of our major superheroes across both the Marvel and DC universes, is that you can kind of keep working with them and reworking them.  

There’s an idea in the comic book universe that these characters are like toys in a toy box, and you can take them out of the toy box and do anything you want with them, play with them in all kinds of unique ways, give them new jobs in the same way that that you would with Barbie dolls and other toys. But, at the end of the day, you must put them back into the toy box. This idea is something that has been popularized by comic book writer Jonathan Hickman, but it is really relevant here, and I think it speaks to why we will keep seeing Spider-Man movies. 

So, you might do really radical things with these characters, but then they still have to be reusable at the end of the day, and Marvel has created really useful ways of doing that. Once you have a multiverse, you just shove them back into that, and then you can pull them out into another universe and do new things with them again, and restart Spider-Man’s story, but restart it in a way that feels like the familiar Spider-Man that we’re used to. That is what I think we will continue to see for the foreseeable future. 

TN: You touched on the friendly neighborhood aspect of the character. What else makes him such an appealing character for audiences? 

Kidd: I think there’s an innocence to Spider-Man that we don’t get with the other characters that come out of comic book lore. I mean, he’s literally a high school student, whereas the others are adults, and we see much darker sides to them. 

We see this in the “idea that with great power comes great responsibility,” because there’s always a moment where he fails at that responsibility, and something bad happens, and then he tries to be more responsible afterwards. 

He’s generally a good kid, and he really is a kid. In some versions, he’s a high school kid, and in others, he is transitioning into college, but he is always much younger than our other superheroes. 

And he is someone who really is struggling with what it means to find the good life and live the good life. I’m deliberately invoking major themes in our education at Temple when I mention that. We all grapple with that question “what does it mean to live the good life?” What is a good society, what is the common good, and what is his role in that? Does he get to decide what’s best for others because he has so much power and is that a responsible thing for him to do? Or should he stay out of other people’s lives? That’s something he’s constantly struggling with. There’s a familiarity that comes from that struggle and it is something we can all relate to. The naivety and youthful goodness of Spider-Man feels so different from say, Batman, who occupies a much darker world and lives in a dark place within that world (a cave beneath a mansion). 

TN: You mentioned the line “With great power comes great responsibility.” How central is that to Spider-Man and his relatability? 

Kidd: It is the line that comes back to Spider-Man over and over again. It shows up in every version of the film series. The first time it appears in print in the comics, it's not his uncle saying it to him, which we assume from the movies, but it’s actually just written, at the top of a panel, meaning the comic book artist is describing the scene. The image shows Spider-Man walking away, and the panel reads, “And a lean, silent figure slowly fades into the gathering darkness, aware at last that in this world, with great power, there must also come great responsibility.” So, (writer) Stan Lee, who is also so key to this discussion, really sets the stage for this line to be central to all those stories. 

And that is something that we have already seen taken out of the toy box and adapted in different versions. For instance, in the most recent film, his Aunt May introduces the line, which is a deviation from his uncle. It is another example of how you can create a new Spider-Man story, but with the same familiar pieces, so that it isn’t just chaos. There is still some order to it that we can recognize. What happened in that film is what we will continue to see in Spider-Man media for years to come, which speaks to just how strong the source material and elements of this character are. 

TN: What do you recommend for a filmgoer who enjoys this movie and wants to explore the spider-multiverse? 

Kidd: Think of comics (comic books, animated shows, movies, etc.) as a busy interstate. How do you on-ramp and get up to speed, knowing you can’t go all the way back and cover every mile of the road? If you're interested in the comic books themselves, take a chance and go to your friendly neighborhood comic bookstore, chat with a clerk, or just take a look at what's on the shelf. Otherwise, consider an app like Marvel Unlimited. The technology for reading comics in digital form is really good, especially on a tablet. Do some research about the history of authors and start with the first issue under a new author. You can definitely go back to the very first issues and read forward, but trying to read everything is overwhelming. Have fun with it! 

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