Spider-Man has been played by three actors in live action, animated into an Oscar winner, sold eleven million copies as a PlayStation exclusive, and put into a hero shooter alongside a talking land shark. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens on 31 July 2026, the fourth Tom Holland film and the eleventh cinema outing for the character since 2002. That is a lot of ways to measure one masked teenager from Queens.
Below he turns up in fifteen rankings — the animation canon, a console's best games, an open-world genre list, and four filmographies where his film is the one nobody argues for.
The catch is that the answer keeps changing. Pick a different list, and Spider-Man becomes a different thing entirely.
Start with the only list that is entirely his
One ranking asks the question directly: which of the Spider-Man films is the best? Ten options, and no two of them are trying to do the same thing.
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004) is the consensus pick of the live-action films, built around Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus and an elevated-train fight that other superhero films still copy. Spider-Man 3 followed three years later with the symbiote suit, Venom and Sandman crammed into one film, and it ended Raimi's trilogy early — a fourth entry was cancelled and the series rebooted with Andrew Garfield in 2012.
The animated films complicate it further. Into the Spider-Verse won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2019, which no live-action Spider-Man film has come close to matching in awards terms.
So the honest version of this question is not "which film" but "which kind of Spider-Man" — and the ten options include three separate Peter Parkers and one Miles Morales.
Widen it to the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe
The MCU ranking holds eighteen films, and two of them are Spider-Man's: No Way Home and Homecoming.
No Way Home grossed $1.92 billion worldwide in 2021 — the highest-grossing Spider-Man film by a wide margin, with Far From Home second at $1.13 billion. It was also the first film of the pandemic era to pass a billion dollars, at a point when studios were still moving release dates around.
The company it keeps is the problem. Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War both out-grossed it, and both close a story arc that ran across a decade rather than one character's trilogy.
The counter-argument for Spider-Man is that he does not belong to Marvel Studios alone. Sony holds the film rights, and the character reached the MCU through a 2015 studio deal — which makes his two entries on this list the only ones that had to be negotiated into existence.
Now drop the films and rank the character
This ranking is not about movies at all. It asks who the best Marvel superhero is, and the options are characters — Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Wolverine, Black Panther and eight more.
Spider-Man's case here is age and reach. He first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and he was Marvel's commercial flagship for decades before a Marvel film existed.
Wolverine arrived eleven years later, in The Incredible Hulk #180 in 1974, and spent the 2000s as the face of the X-Men on screen while Spider-Man carried Sony's side of the same business.
What makes the character lens different from every film lens is that the argument stops being about execution. Nobody here is defending a bad third act. The question is which mask you would put on a comic-book cover if you only got one.
Narrow it to sequels wearing capes
Thirteen superhero sequels, and Spider-Man has two of them: Spider-Man 2 and No Way Home.
Spider-Man 2 is the reason "the sequel is better" became a standard claim about superhero films. It came out in 2004, four years before The Dark Knight, and it did the thing Raimi's first film could not — dropped the origin story and spent the running time on a villain with a motive.
Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is the obvious rival, and it has an advantage no Spider-Man film has: Heath Ledger's posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as the Joker in 2009. No Spider-Man performance has been nominated in an acting category.
The rest of the field is mostly Marvel Studios — Endgame, Infinity War, The Winter Soldier, Thor: Ragnarok, Civil War — plus Logan, X2, Superman II and Batman Returns. Narrow enough that Spider-Man is a genuine contender, and crowded enough that he is not alone.
Delete the word "superhero" and watch the room change
The same film, Spider-Man 2, appears on a ranking of the sixteen best movie sequels ever made — no genre filter at all.
Its neighbours are The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens, Terminator 2, The Silence of the Lambs and Mad Max: Fury Road. The Godfather Part II won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, the first sequel ever to do it.
This is the single clearest demonstration of what the format does. Nothing about Spider-Man 2 changed between the last section and this one. The question did, and a strong contender became a small name in serious company.
That is not an insult to the film. It is what happens when the comparison set stops being curated in your favour.
Move to animation, where he has an Academy Award
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won Best Animated Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards, and this ranking puts every winner of that category against each other.
The list runs from Shrek, the first winner in 2002, through Spirited Away, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Coco and Soul, to Flow and KPop Demon Hunters. Twenty-five films, and Spider-Man is one of them.
The awkward one is sitting six entries away. The Boy and the Heron won in 2024 — the year Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was nominated and lost, prompting Miles Morales voice actor Shameik Moore to post that the film had been "robbed" before apologising for the reaction.
Hayao Miyazaki has two films in this ranking. Sony Pictures Animation has one, and the sequel most people call the better film is not in the category at all.
Cross animation with sequels and the other one appears
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse arrived in 2023 and does something unusual for a middle chapter: it ends on a cliffhanger with no resolution, because the trilogy's finale was already in production.
That finale, Beyond the Spider-Verse, is now dated 25 June 2027. It was pushed indefinitely during the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes and took nearly two years to get a firm date back, then moved three more weeks from 4 June.
The competition on this ranking is Pixar and DreamWorks at full strength — Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Shrek 2, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Incredibles 2, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Six of the twelve options come from two studios.
An unfinished story is a real argument against Across the Spider-Verse here, and it is the one thing Toy Story 3 cannot be accused of.
Leave cinema entirely: the games
Five of the fourteen options on this ranking of Marvel video games are Spider-Man games. No other Marvel character has more than one.
The list runs Marvel's Spider-Man, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Miles Morales, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and a 1992 Amazing Spider-Man 2 handheld title, against Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Marvel's Midnight Suns, X-Men Legends and Marvel Rivals.
Insomniac Games' Marvel's Spider-Man 2 passed 11 million copies by April 2024 and became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game, moving 2.5 million in its first 24 hours.
The older options have a claim the new ones do not. Marvel Ultimate Alliance let players build a team from the whole roster in 2006, and its argument is breadth — a Spider-Man game, by definition, only has room for one.
Same games, judged as PlayStation exclusives
The PS5 ranking removes Marvel from the question and asks which game is the best on the console. Two Spider-Man titles survive the cut: Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Miles Morales, which was a launch title in November 2020.
Being a launch title matters more than it sounds. Miles Morales was one of the first games PS5 buyers had to play on the hardware, which is why a spin-off the size of Miles Morales is on a console's all-time list at all.
The opposition is Sony's own studios. Astro Bot won Game of the Year at the 2024 Game Awards, and God of War Ragnarok, Demon's Souls, Returnal and Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut are all first-party too, alongside Baldur's Gate 3 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Spider-Man's problem here is that he is licensed and they are not. Insomniac is a PlayStation studio, but Marvel is not, and every rival on the list belongs to whoever made the console.
Judge the same game as an open world instead
Marvel's Spider-Man (2018) is one of twenty options on a ranking of the greatest open-world games, and this is where the superhero framing stops helping.
Its map is a compressed Manhattan — one borough, no wilderness, no second city. Traversal is the celebrated part: web-swinging that reads as a movement system rather than a way of getting from A to B.
Everything around it is enormous by comparison. Red Dead Redemption 2 built a frontier across five fictional states, Breath of the Wild dropped players into Hyrule with no directed path, and Skyrim, GTA V, Elden Ring and Minecraft all trade in scale or freedom that one island cannot match.
The Spider-Man argument is that the genre's usual measure — map size — is the wrong one. Swinging through a dense city is the point, and a bigger, emptier map would make the game worse.
Ask the actor who is about to release his fourth Spider-Man film
Eleven films on Tom Holland's list, and four of them put him in the suit: Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home and — from this week — Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton with Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal and Mark Ruffalo.
Add Civil War, Infinity War and Endgame, where he plays the same character inside somebody else's film, and Spider-Man accounts for most of the ranking on his own.
The films that are not Marvel are the interesting part. The Impossible came out in 2012, when Holland was sixteen, and his performance as a boy separated from his family in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is the one critics reached for when Marvel cast him three years later.
Cherry, Uncharted and Chaos Walking are the counter-evidence — three attempts at a non-Spider-Man leading role, none of which changed what he is known for.
Ask the actor who did it first
Tobey Maguire played Spider-Man three times between 2002 and 2007, then returned to the role in No Way Home fourteen years later. All four appearances are on his ranking of thirteen films.
The 2002 original is the one with the historical claim. It opened to $114.8 million in North America, the first film to pass $100 million in a single weekend, and it is the reason studios started building schedules around comic-book properties.
His non-Spider-Man work is a different kind of career: The Cider House Rules, Wonder Boys, The Ice Storm, Pleasantville, Seabiscuit — mostly 1990s and early-2000s dramas, made before and around the trilogy rather than after it.
The Great Gatsby is the closest thing to a post-Spider-Man lead, and even there he is the narrator standing next to Leonardo DiCaprio.
Ask his co-star, who has a day job elsewhere
Zendaya has played MJ in three Spider-Man films and returns in Brand New Day, which makes the role the longest-running thing on her ranking of ten screen performances.
It is also the one with the least to work with. MJ is a supporting character in somebody else's origin story, written mostly as dry commentary and a reason for Peter Parker to have something to lose.
Rue Bennett in Euphoria is the counter-example. Zendaya won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for it in 2020, becoming the youngest winner in the category at 24, and won it again in 2022.
Challengers, Dune and The Greatest Showman fill out the list. Four of the ten options are film leads, and none of the four is the Spider-Man one.
The lens where Spider-Man is a footnote
Emma Stone played Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its 2014 sequel. On a ranking of her twelve best performances, the Spider-Man film is the one with the least behind it.
She has since won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice — for La La Land in 2017 and Poor Things in 2024 — and been nominated for Birdman, The Favourite and Battle of the Sexes. Five nominations, two wins, none of them for a comic-book film.
The Favourite is a useful comparison because it shows what the surrounding work looks like: a Yorgos Lanthimos period comedy where Stone plays a servant clawing into Queen Anne's court, and where the acting Oscar in the room went to Olivia Colman.
The Gwen Stacy case is not about the performance. It is that the role existed to be Peter Parker's girlfriend, and no amount of talent turns that into the best thing an actor has done.
And the lens where he barely registers
Jake Gyllenhaal played Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019). It is one of fourteen options on his performance ranking, and it is the hardest one to argue for.
Nightcrawler is the reason. Gyllenhaal lost a significant amount of weight to play Lou Bloom, a freelance crime videographer who films what he causes, and the performance is the one his career gets measured against.
Behind it sit Brokeback Mountain, which brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 2006, plus Zodiac, Donnie Darko, Prisoners and Southpaw. Six films with a serious claim before anyone reaches the Marvel entry.
The fair version of the Mysterio argument is that it is a good performance in a film built around a twist — an illusionist selling a fake heroic persona, which is exactly the kind of part Gyllenhaal is good at. It just happens to be his fourteenth-most-discussed role rather than his first.
One character, fifteen different jobs
An Oscar-winning animated film, a console launch title, a compressed Manhattan, a comic-book cover from 1962, and a supporting credit on four other people's filmographies. Spider-Man is all of those, and which one he is depends entirely on the question in front of him.
Brand New Day opens on 31 July 2026, so a sixteenth framing is about to exist — and it will slot into some of these lists and not others. It's the same trick behind every ranking here — judging things two at a time.
All fifteen rankings, in one place:
- What is the best Spider-Man movie of all time?
- What is the best MCU movie of all time?
- Who is the best Marvel superhero of all time?
- What is the best superhero movie sequel of all time?
- The 16 Best Movie Sequels of All Time
- What is the best Oscar-winning animated movie of all time?
- What is the best animated movie sequel of all time?
- What is the best Marvel superhero video game of all time?
- What is the best PS5 game of all time?
- The 20 Greatest Open-World Video Games of All Time
- What is the best Tom Holland movie?
- What is the best Tobey Maguire movie?
- What is Zendaya's best screen role?
- What is the best Emma Stone performance of all time?
- What are the best Jake Gyllenhaal performances of all time?
Got a character who turns up everywhere? Build a ranking and find out where they land.
More rankings, more angles
- 16 Rankings, One Batman — the other flagship comic-book character
- Star Wars: 16 Lists, 16 Different Answers — a franchise measured the same way
- Super Mario vs The Legend of Zelda: 16 Rankings, One Argument — two game franchises, side by side