Spider-Verse Movies Ranked: From Worst to Best

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can – and everybody knows it. Unless you’ve been living under a literal rock since the 1960s, chances are you’ve at least heard of the web-slinger Peter Parker, a.k.a Spider-Man. The Marvel comic book character has become an immortal symbol of hope for his never-ending fan base and has transcended time by still being (arguably) the most popular Marvel comic book character to date. Fans know Spider-Man is a deeply complex character with sacrifice built into his backstory/canon. Yet, he still manages to always look out for the little guy by staying true to his humble title of “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” – and that’s why audiences the world over love and relate to him. These qualities and obstacles make Spider-Man the perfect character for on-screen interpretations, and Hollywood has milked that cow for as much as they possibly could over the last few decades – and some of those interpretations were better received than others. Keeping that in mind, let’s look at all of the movies the Spider-Verse has created over the years and see how they stack up against each other. That’s right – it’s time for Spider-Verse Movies Ranked.

Madame Web (2024)

Director S. J. Clarkson has spent the last couple of decades doing strong work in television, so a lot of people were interested to see what she would end up making as her first feature. Unfortunately, she got attached to this mess. A mish-mash of characters only Sony would have thought could carry their own film, filled with laughable dialogue, listless performances, horrible overdubbing (the performance of Tahar Rahim as the villain suffers most of all), and obnoxious references to Spider-Man (how many times is Adam Scott’s Ben Parker referred to awkwardly by his full name?) The film is largely set in 2003 and it feels like an awkward throwback to those days when studios were trying to crack the code on comic book movies while still being embarrassed to be working with comic book source material. Sure, we got X-Men and Spider-Man out of those days, but we also got Elektra and Fantastic Four. Madame Web fits right in with the latter two… but it’s a lot worse than they were. Clarkson, Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Emma Roberts, Scott, Rahim, they all deserved much better than this.

Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Kraven the Hunter centers on one of the most formidable characters in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, had a director (J.C. Chandor) with multiple highly acclaimed films to his credit, and a script from writers who previously contributed to The Equalizer, Iron Man, and Punisher: War Zone. This one seemed like it could break the “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe” curse and be a good movie about a Spider-Man villain. But something went wrong. You can tell Chandor was trying to make something special, but the movie turned out to be incredibly dull, with an overly long origin flashback, a crime thriller story that isn’t interesting in the slightest, and really cheesy attempts to lean into “comic bookishness.” If features several characters from Spider-Man comics: Kraven, Calypso, the Foreigner, the Rhino, Chameleon… but doesn’t do much with them. The presentation of the Rhino is atrocious and the way Kraven’s vigilante crusade is presented doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was doing his best to make Kraven a cool, badass lead character, but the movie around him just doesn’t work. It’s a 127 minute slog to get through.

Venom: The Last Dance (2024)

Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage screenwriter Kelly Marcel was promoted to writer/director for the trilogy capper – and the story she and Tom Hardy crafted for this film had the makings of an epic. There’s a symbiote-hunting task force, monstrous creatures, a god-like being that wants to wipe out planets, and Venom caught in the middle. But instead of playing up the world-destroying stakes, Venom: The Last Dance continues to lean into that goofball Venom movie tone that makes everything seem silly and empty, taking the time to show us things like Venom taking over the body of a horse, then a frog, then dancing to ABBA, and Eddie Brock hanging out with a random family of hippies. It all builds up to a massive battle between symbiotes and Xenophages at Area 51 – which isn’t very thrilling, because it’s just a bunch of CGI slime splashing across the screen. Oddly, given that this was designed to be the last film in the series, the film leaves bigger dangling threads than its predecessors did. It’s an underwhelming film, and the trilogy ending this way just further drives home what a missed opportunity these Venom movies were.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

It was an event that Marvel Comics fans had been dreaming of for nearly 30 years: a movie about the symbiote antihero Venom clashing with the maniacal symbiote Carnage! But somehow, director Andy Serkis’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage manages to give us the introduction and destruction of Carnage in just 90 minutes. This sequel not only retains that goofy tone the previous movie had, it goes even further with it, while also feeling really small and inconsequential, speeding through its silly story. Venom (and Carnage) deserved bigger and better than these bite-size, big budget B-movies Sony pumped out. A lot about this movie is a letdown, but what it has going for it is the fact that it features much more symbiote action than its predecessor did, with Venom being there from the start, and it’s fun to see Woody Harrelson as the villain, the rampaging, symbiote-bonded serial killer Cletus Kasady… even if he is 20 years older than the character is meant to be. (Harrelson’s casting was a nice Natural Born Killers callback that began with a mid-credit appearance in the first film.) It all builds up to a 10 minute Venom vs. Carnage smash-up that occurs entirely in and around a church and is not exactly the thing dreams are made of. But at least we saw some kind of Venom / Carnage fight brought to the screen in live-action. Right?

Morbius (2022)

Morbius has carried his own Marvel Comics titles multiple times and he had the potential to star in a really cool super-powered horror action film… but director Daniel Espinosa and Sony gave him a movie that feels just as slapdash and underwhelming as the Venom flicks. A surprisingly dull Jared Leto plays the doctor who accidentally turns himself into a living vampire and has to face off his with a dancing, scenery chewing Matt Smith, as Morbius’s buddy who purposely turns himself into a vampire. The overall movie isn’t as bad as the mocking memes would make it seem, it’s just lackluster, with logic and storytelling leaps that may have been caused by studio meddling, reshoots, and chunks of story being cut out. (Did you know Tyrese Gibson’s character was supposed to have a bionic arm and a brawl with Matt Smith, but all of that was cut?) Things don’t fully go off the rails until Sony drops in two of the worst end credits scenes ever conceived, bringing in a dimension-jumping Michael Keaton as his Spider-Man: Homecoming character Vulture, who randomly decides he wants to start a team with Morbius. It’s Sony’s bumbling attempt to set up the Sinister Six movie they’ve long been obsessed with making, and it’s ridiculous.

Venom (2018)

It would take a couple of films to properly bring the Marvel Comics character Venom to the screen – but
Spider-Man 3 tried to speed through the character’s introduction (and destruction) in just one movie. It didn’t work. So Sony decided to try again by rebooting, cutting out Spider-Man completely, and just giving Venom his own solo movie. They came closer to doing right by the character this time… and yet, they were still so far. Venom and other symbiotes ride to Earth on a crashing probe sent into space by the Life Foundation. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the unscrupulous head of the Foundation, conducts deadly experiments with the symbiotes, catching the attention of investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) – and when Venom bonds with Eddie, they team up to take Drake down. Symbiote action ensues… eventually. Directed by Ruben Fleischer, the movie takes a surprisingly long time to get to the “Brock and Venom” of it all, and even longer to show Venom in all of his slimy glory. The tone of the Brock and Venom interactions just don’t fit the bill of what fans had set in their minds, either. After all, Venom is one of Spider-Man’s most notorious villains, and the character is (by nature) a darker one. Instead of honing in on that, the movie is more like an odd couple buddy-cop comedy with hints of darkness sprinkled in. The movie is decently entertaining, but underwhelming, and is still a questionable interpretation of Venom.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

“His Greatest Battle Begins” said the tagline for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a movie so poorly received, so poorly thought out, and so overly expensive that this iteration of Spider-Man’s greatest battle both began and ended right here. The scenes involving the relationship between Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) are great. We get a perfect-looking Spider-Man who acts just like he does in the source material: constantly bouncing around and babbling non-stop. But the script is an over-reaching, cobbled together mess that gets some things very wrong: the villains. The blue CGI version of Electro (whose thoughts are put to music – “Fragility / Electricity / That Spider-Man, he is my enemy”) mixed with a watered-down Green Goblin and a mechanical Rhino, sadly made this film more of a joke than it could have been. And then there’s the stuff dealing with Peter’s parents and the revelation that Richard Parker had a Batman cave in the New York subway system… The death of Gwen Stacy is still one of the hardest-hitting moments in the entirety of the Spider-Verse films, but it shares the running time with some absolutely awful stuff. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is full of absurd decisions, and it was trying to do way too much at once.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

When the development of Spider-Man 4 crumbled and Sam Raimi stepped away, Sony made the surprising decision to put a full-on reboot on the fast track, with director Marc Webb and the screenwriters choosing to tell the Spider-Man origin story, which Raimi had told to near-perfection just ten years earlier, all over again. Although they were going for a “darker, modern” tone rather than Raimi’s throwback vibe, this was a gutsy move that sort of painted the filmmakers into a corner because they had to get across the same ideas as Raimi did without doing the same scenes, and from the very start they were dooming their movie to come off as repetitious and inferior to a lot of viewers. There is some good stuff in The Amazing Spider-Man involving the villainous Lizard and the story of the relationship that develops between the kid beneath the Spider-Man mask, Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield), and his high school classmate Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and Garfield and Stone had incredible chemistry with each other, but the movie wastes way too much of its running time on the needless retelling of the origin and ends up feeling messy, with plotlines and characters being tossed aside along the way.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Sam Raimi had just delivered two of the greatest comic book movies ever made, but that didn’t save him from having to deal with studio meddling on Spider-Man 3. While Raimi was focused on bringing villains from the 1960s to the screen (he wanted Sandman and The Vulture to be the bad guys in this film), Sony urged him to include Venom, a character from the ‘80s and one Raimi had already expressed disinterest in. But he accommodated the studio and shoehorned Venom, along with all of the build-up that’s required for him, into the movie shortly before filming was going to begin. Venom got mixed into a story that also involves Sandman, relationship issues, the continuing mental deterioration of a character into the second Green Goblin (and his redemption), adding in scenes of with rival photographer, Spider-Man being negatively influenced by the black suit symbiote, and the rival photographer being disgraced, bonding with the symbiote, and becoming Venom just in time for the final battle. There are so many character plots going on in the film that in the end it feels like everyone gets shortchanged and the film collapses under the weight of too many characters, bad decisions, and silly story elements.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

What was Marvel’s solution to helping fans get over the death of Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame? Oh yeah – they brought him up during every scene of Spider-Man: Far from Home a few months later. While mourning the loss of his mentor (and checking out a pair of AI-enhanced sunglasses Stark left for him), Peter Parker goes on a European vacation with his high school classmates, gets caught up in an invasion of multiversal beings called the Elementals, and befriends a superhero from another universe: Mysterio (played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who almost played Spider-Man himself back in the day). At least, that’s how things seem at first. As heroic as he was, Tony Stark was also responsible for a lot of threats the heroes in the MCU have had to face, and in this movie, even though he’s dead, he’s still taking the blame for problems. Despite the fact that Spider-Man: Far from Home is overly focused on the late Iron Man, it’s still a fun movie with a very likeable cast, some cool action, and lots of great moments.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Our spider-people heroes Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), and Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) thought they saved the multiverse at the end of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
– but they actually left the situation in such a mess that Spider-Man 2099, a.k.a. Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) had to form an inter-dimensional task force to clean it up. Miguel’s methods don’t sit well with all of the spider-people, though… With a running time of 140 minutes, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
is one of the longest animated movies of all time, and watching the movie can be a sensory overloading experience for a lot of those minutes, as it’s packed with lengthy, dizzying chase scenes through a variety of animation styles. The film is at its best when it slows down to do some character work – but by the time the end credits roll, only half of its story has been told, so it’s not entirely satisfying to watch on its own. We’re left with a cliffhanger that a sequel is going to have to resolve several years later.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

Welcome home, Spidey. Audiences remember the legal issue that prevented Spider-Man from joining his comic-book counterparts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and they also remember what a sigh of relief it was when he finally made the crossover in Captain America: Civil War. Tom Holland taking up the mantle of the web-slinger was a phenomenal casting choice – and even though Spider-Man: Homecoming is about another villain with a petty grudge against Tony Stark, the father/son bond between Peter and Tony and the overall arc of Peter having to become ‘more than just a suit’ perfectly introduces the character into the larger cinematic universe. Director Jon Watts brought a fun, John Hughes-inspired vibe to the film, assembled a cool soundtrack, and made the great decision to cast Michael Keaton as The Vulture. Keaton does a terrific job as the character, making the villain a guy you can understand. He’s doing criminal things, but you know his motivation for doing them. You can see his side of it… but at the same time, he can be deeply chilling when he threatens someone who is getting in his way.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

When the Spider-Man franchise was rebooted with The Amazing Spider-Man, fans assumed they would never get to see Tobey Maguire play Peter Parker again. When Tom Holland became the MCU’s Spider-Man, fans assumed the same about Andrew Garfield. And yet here we are, a film that gives fans the gift of seeing Maguire, Garfield, and Holland share the screen as versions of the same character, giving some resolution to the Maguire and Garfield versions, and also having them team up against villains from previous films: Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Lizard, and Electro (given a very welcome makeover). Sure, the movie may be entirely dependent on audiences’ knowledge and love of all prior Spider-Man movies and if you’ve never seen any other Spider-Man movies, then this movie will probably be mind-boggling. But if you’re a Spider-Man fanatic, then this may well be your favorite Spider-Man movie. When the movie reaches its darkest point, Maguire and Garfield come in as two bright beams of light, taking the whole thing to a more fun and heartwarming level – and seeing the three Spider-Man work together is a thing of pure joy.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Peter Parker is the Spider-Man we’ve known and loved for over sixty years – but in 2011, Marvel Comics introduced another Spider-Man who is appreciated by his fans just as much as Peter Parker ever was: Miles Morales. And, after fans spent years hoping to see him on the big screen, Miles got his chance to shine (while still sharing the screen with multiple versions of Peter Parker) in the animated adventure
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. When the Kingpin rips a hole into parallel universes, the spider-bitten Miles has to become a hero and work alongside spider-people from other worlds (including a talking pig, a noir detective, a down-on-his-luck Peter B. Parker, and his classmate crush Gwen Stacy) to fix this multiversal mess. The animation in this film was revolutionary and ground-breaking; the character arcs and development are pristine; the soundtrack is incredible. And what really makes this one stand out as something special is the fact that an audience member could have know absolutely nothing about the character of Spider-Man (either Miles Morales or Peter Parker) and not just walk away from the movie knowing everything about them, but also loving and caring about them.

Spider-Man (2002)

Sam Raimi getting the job to direct Spider-Man wasn’t just a win for the director, who was getting his biggest break yet, but also a win for all of the fans that had been rooting for him as he built up his career following The Evil Dead. And he didn’t let any of us down, delivering an almost perfect adaptation of the early Spider-Man comics. (Just how close it came to perfection may depend on how you feel about organic webshooters, or whether or not you think Spidey drops enough quips). Tobey Maguire made for a great Peter Parker, Willem Dafoe turns in an awesome performance as the villain – even when wearing a large helmet, J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson seems like he stepped right off the page, and Raimi’s style and unique camera moves were a perfect match for Spidey. Plus, we get a cameo from Bruce Campbell as the guy who gives Spider-Man his name! If you’re a fan of the “Silver Age” of Marvel Comics, you couldn’t hope to get a much better Spider-Man film than the one Sam Raimi brought to the world with his Spider-Man in 2002.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was the perfect origin story – and with Spider-Man 2, he made the perfect sequel. As incredible as the first movie is, Raimi managed to up his game with the follow-up, which has an admirable focus on character that makes it not just a fantastic superhero movie but also a great dramatic film. The movie does a wonderful job dealing with the emotional fallout from the events of and the decisions made in its predecessor. As Peter Parker struggles with his double life as Spider-Man and the girl he loves, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) moves on to someone else, his best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) is slowly losing his mind over the loss of his father, who he believes was murdered by Spider-Man. Then a new villain arrives, with Alfred Molina fully becoming Doctor Octopus in an awe-inspiring scene that feels like it’s straight out of an Evil Dead movie and caused parents to cover their kids’ eyes in the theatres. Spider-Man 2 easily ranks as one of the best live-action comic book movies ever made – and if you still consider it the best superhero movie ever made, more than twenty years and many more comic book movies down the line, it would be difficult to make an argument against that opinion.

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