Sony has been making Spider-Man films for more than two decades, across three lead actors, two animated worlds and one crossover event that broke the box office. Spider-Man: Brand New Day landed on 31 July 2026 and goes straight in at number two, so the whole catalogue is due a reshuffle.
The short answer: Spider-Man 2 is still the best Spider-Man film ever made, Brand New Day is the closest anything has come to it in twenty years, and Spider-Man: No Way Home is still the best night any of us have ever had watching one. Those last two are different things, and the gap between them is what this ranking is really about.
Below is every theatrical Spider-Man film ranked worst to best: the nine live-action outings, the two Spider-Verse animations, and the Marvel team-up films where Peter Parker turns up in someone else’s story. Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb and Letterboxd scores are here as context, but this is a Merch Mates verdict, not a maths problem. The numbers set the table. Taste seats the guests.
A quick note on what counts. A Spider-Man movie here means a film where Spider-Man is the lead. That keeps Venom, Morbius and the rest of Sony’s spin-off corner in their own box near the bottom, where the honest answer to “do they count?” lives.
Every Spider-Man film at a glance
| Film | Year | Lead | RT critics | RT audience | IMDb |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spider-Man 2 | 2004 | Maguire | 93% | 82% | 7.5 |
| Spider-Man: Brand New Day | 2026 | Holland | 91% | 98% | 8.2 |
| Spider-Man: No Way Home | 2021 | Holland | 93% | 97% | 8.2 |
| Spider-Man | 2002 | Maguire | 90% | 67% | 7.4 |
| Spider-Man: Homecoming | 2017 | Holland | 92% | 87% | 7.4 |
| Spider-Man: Far From Home | 2019 | Holland | 91% | 95% | 7.4 |
| The Amazing Spider-Man | 2012 | Garfield | 71% | 77% | 6.9 |
| Spider-Man 3 | 2007 | Maguire | 62% | 51% | 6.3 |
| The Amazing Spider-Man 2 | 2014 | Garfield | 51% | 64% | 6.6 |
| Into the Spider-Verse | 2018 | Animated | 97% | 93% | 8.4 |
| Across the Spider-Verse | 2023 | Animated | 95% | 95% | 8.5 |
The order below is the Merch Mates ranking, not this table’s sort. The animated films are ranked in their own section because they play by different rules, and because dropping them into the live-action list would put them at the top and end the argument before it started.
Live-action Spider-Man movies ranked worst to best
Nine films, three actors, one hero. This is where most of the debate lives, so this is where we start.
9. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
The lowest point of the live-action run, and the film that ended an era. Marc Webb’s second Amazing outing tries to build a Sinister Six universe, a Green Goblin, a Rhino and an Electro all at once, and buckles under the weight of the setup.
Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are genuinely excellent together, which is what makes the rest so frustrating. The chemistry is real. The film around it is a pile-up of franchise homework, and the clock tower scene it builds to deserved a better two hours in front of it.
Its 51% critics score is the lowest of any Spider-Man-titled film, and the reaction was severe enough that Sony rebooted the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe rather than continue. Worth saying plainly, though: this is the film’s failure, not its lead’s. More on that at number six.
8. Spider-Man 3 (2007)
The famous one. Emo Peter, the dance, three villains, and a tone that lurches from tragedy to slapstick and back inside a single scene. Sam Raimi has been open that the studio pushed Venom on him against his instincts, and the seams show.
Here is the honest position, though. Spider-Man 3 is alive today because of the memes, not because of the film. The Bully Maguire cut, the strut down the street, the jazz club: an entire second life built out of the exact material that sank it on release. Strip the memes away and what is left is a cluttered, tonally confused sequel with a strong Sandman arc buried inside it.
By the numbers it sits close to the bottom, with 62% from critics and a franchise-low 51% audience score. Culturally it refuses to die. Both of those things are true, and only one of them is about the filmmaking.
7. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
The MCU’s victory lap after Endgame, and a lighter film for it. Tom Holland’s European holiday gone wrong is breezy and charming, and the illusion sequences are the most visually adventurous the live-action films had been in years.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is also a much smarter villain than the marketing let on. The twist lands, and it lands because the film spends its first hour making you want the thing Mysterio is offering: an adult to hand the job to. That is a proper piece of writing hiding inside a summer comedy.
It sits seventh because it is slight by design. The stakes are deliberately smaller, the grief over Tony Stark is handled with a light touch, and the film is content to be a holiday adventure rather than a defining chapter. Its 95% audience score says people had a very good time, and they did.
6. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
A reboot nobody was quite asking for, arriving only five years after Raimi’s trilogy ended, and considerably better than that timing deserved. Garfield’s Peter is quicker and spikier than Maguire’s, the web-shooters are practical again, and the skateboarding, wisecracking take on the character has aged far better than the reception at the time suggested.
Here is the thing about Andrew Garfield, and it is the reason this film climbs above Far From Home rather than sitting below it. His Spider-Man was better than the writing ever let him become. The performance is loose, funny, physically inventive and genuinely wounded in a way none of the others quite manage, and it is stuck inside two films that were too busy building a universe to notice what they had.
I should be upfront about the bias here. Maguire’s films were on in the background of my childhood, but Garfield arrived exactly when I started taking films seriously, and he is the Spider-Man I think of first. He is also the only one of the three who never got a trilogy, which remains a genuine shame. No Way Home understood this better than his own films did, which is why his best scene in the role is in someone else’s movie.
The film itself loses points for retreading the origin so soon and for a Lizard who never becomes more than functional. What it gets right is the feeling of being Spider-Man: the first-person swinging, the physicality, a teenager enjoying his powers.
5. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
The best pure “teenager with a secret” film in the franchise. Holland’s debut leans all the way into the John Hughes high-school comedy, and it works because the film understands that Peter wanting to be an Avenger is less interesting than Peter wanting to take a girl to homecoming.
Michael Keaton’s Vulture is one of the franchise’s few genuinely great villains: grounded, working-class, and menacing in a car-in-the-driveway sort of way. The reveal on that drive is the best single scene of the entire MCU Spider-Man run, and it is two people talking.
It sits fifth because it is smaller in ambition than the four above it, which is by design. As a debut it is close to flawless.
4. Spider-Man (2002)
The one that started all of this, and the film that proved the modern superhero movie could work at scale. Raimi’s original is earnest in a way blockbusters rarely allow themselves now, and that sincerity is exactly why it holds up.
Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin remains one of the best-cast comic-book villains ever put on screen, the upside-down kiss is genuinely iconic, and Maguire’s wide-eyed decency defined the character for a generation. The CGI has dated. The heart has not.
For a lot of us this was the first superhero film we ever watched, arriving via the PlayStation games rather than the comics, which is its own kind of origin story. Fourth place is not a criticism. It is a measure of how good the three films above it are.
3. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
The event. Three Spider-Men, a rogues’ gallery pulled across the multiverse, and a night in December 2021 that felt like an entire fandom holding its breath in the same room. No Way Home is the most purely thrilling Spider-Man film to sit in an audience for, and its franchise-high 97% audience score is no accident.
It is also, and this is the part most rankings will not say, built almost entirely out of nostalgia and fan service. That is not a criticism of its execution. The execution is superb, and the writing underneath the reunion is better than it needed to be: the film is really about consequence and loss, and it makes Holland’s Peter earn the version of the character he becomes by the end.
But here is the test that decides third place. It was the best time I have had in a cinema with this character, and I have not put it on since. The film above it I have watched more times than I can count. A film that runs on the thrill of the room is a different thing from a film that runs on itself, and only one of those survives the second viewing intact.
Ask again in ten years. It may well climb back up. It has not had the time yet.
2. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Destin Daniel Cretton picks Peter up four years after the spell at the end of No Way Home wiped him from everyone’s memory, and spends the whole 145 minutes on what that cost him. There are no portals and no universe-ending event. Peter is in his mid-twenties, living alone in a drab flat in Queens, and nobody left alive knows who he is.
That premise could have been miserable and it isn’t, because the film keeps finding room for the character’s natural buoyancy. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is the best thing this run has added. He’s the only person left who knows who Peter is under the mask, which makes him both a warning about where isolation leads and the most dependable friend Peter has. The fighting is the most physical these films have been, partly because Cretton’s stunt team took moves from Insomniac’s games and worked out which ones could be built for real. Holland has never been better than he is in the quiet stretches near the start, and it’s the first script that has asked him for stillness.
The villains are the weak point. Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey works mostly through psychic control of other people, which is efficient as a plot engine but means she barely gets a scene of her own, and Michael Mando and Marvin Jones III are left holding setup rather than payoff. That’s what keeps it off the top spot. It goes above No Way Home because it doesn’t need three other Spider-Men in the room to work, and because it’s the one I expect to watch again. Our full Spider-Man: Brand New Day review scored it 9.5.
1. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
More than twenty years on, still the one to beat. Raimi’s sequel is the rare superhero film where the character work, the villain, the set pieces and the theme all pull in the same direction. Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock is tragic and terrifying in equal measure, the train fight is a masterpiece of blockbuster staging, and Peter’s crisis of faith gives the spectacle something to be about.
What separates it from everything else here is that it does not need you to have seen anything else. No multiverse, no shared universe homework, no returning cast to carry the emotional weight. A man is very tired and cannot afford his rent and keeps going anyway, and somehow that is the most exciting film in the franchise.
It holds a Metacritic score of 83, the highest of any live-action entry, and was for well over a decade the default answer to “best superhero film ever made”. The genre has grown up around it and it still stands near the front. An absolute classic, and the only Spider-Man film that has genuinely stood the test of time.
Animated Spider-Man movies ranked
Two films, one of the great runs in modern animation. On raw quality both would sit at the very top of the list above. They earn their own section because they belong to a different tradition, and because ranking a photoreal Maguire against a hand-stylised Miles Morales compares two different art forms.
2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
The film that rewrote what animated blockbusters could look like. Into the Spider-Verse turns comic-book panelling, halftone dots and mixed frame rates into a visual language of its own, and wraps it around the best origin story the franchise has told since 2002.
Miles Morales is a great lead, the emotional core is unforced, and the leap of faith is one of the best sequences in any Spider-Man film. Its 97% critics score is the highest of any film in this ranking.
Second here only because of what came next.
1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
The sequel that got bigger without getting bloated. Across the Spider-Verse expands the concept into hundreds of Spider-people and a genuinely unsettling villain in the Spot, while sharpening its emotional stakes around Miles, Gwen and the idea that a story can be a cage.
It leads the entire franchise on IMDb at 8.5, and on release it briefly held the highest average rating of any film on Letterboxd, only the fifth film ever to reach the top of that list. It has since settled to a 4.4 average from more than 3.6 million ratings, which is still extraordinary. The only real mark against it is structural: it is part one of two, and it ends mid-sentence.
That cliffhanger resolves when Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse arrives on 18 June 2027, a date reaffirmed at CinemaCon in April 2026 after several previous slips. On the evidence of the first two, it is the most anticipated Spider-Man film on the horizon.
Marvel movies Spider-Man appears in, ranked
Peter Parker headlines his own films, but three of his most important appearances are in other people’s. These are not Spider-Man movies, so they sit outside the main ranking. As films, and as showcases for Holland’s Spidey, here is how they land.
3. Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Spider-Man’s live-action MCU debut, and one of the best character introductions the franchise ever managed. Peter is on screen for a fraction of the runtime and walks away with the airport battle. The film itself is a strong, crowded Avengers story wearing a Captain America title.
2. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
The payoff. Spider-Man’s return in the final act lands because Endgame spends three hours earning it. As a Spider-Man appearance it is brief. As cinema-as-event it is the peak of the entire Infinity Saga.
1. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Home to Spider-Man’s single most devastating scene. Peter’s death on Titan is the emotional gut-punch of the whole Marvel run, and Holland’s performance in that moment did more for the character than either of his solo films to that point. The best film Spider-Man appears in, and the one that hurts the most.
Another way to slice it: Sony era vs MCU era
Every live-action Spider-Man film is a Sony Pictures release. The difference is who was in the director’s chair upstairs. The Raimi and Amazing films are Sony’s own productions. The Tom Holland films are co-produced with Marvel Studios, which is why they slot into the wider MCU, and why they carry a different set of obligations. A Holland film has to serve the machine as well as the character, and you can feel it.
Sony’s own era (Raimi, Webb and the animations)
| Film | Year | RT critics |
|---|---|---|
| Into the Spider-Verse | 2018 | 97% |
| Across the Spider-Verse | 2023 | 95% |
| Spider-Man 2 | 2004 | 93% |
| Spider-Man | 2002 | 90% |
| The Amazing Spider-Man | 2012 | 71% |
| Spider-Man 3 | 2007 | 62% |
| The Amazing Spider-Man 2 | 2014 | 51% |
The Marvel Studios era (Tom Holland)
| Film | Year | RT critics |
|---|---|---|
| Spider-Man: No Way Home | 2021 | 93% |
| Spider-Man: Homecoming | 2017 | 92% |
| Spider-Man: Far From Home | 2019 | 91% |
| Spider-Man: Brand New Day | 2026 | 91% |
The MCU era is remarkably consistent: four films, all in the low nineties. Sony’s own era swings from the franchise’s best to its worst, sometimes inside the same trilogy. Consistency is not the same as ambition, and the two tables show you exactly what each approach buys and what it costs.
Do the Venom and Sony Universe movies count?
Short answer: no. Spider-Man does not appear as the lead in any of them, and in most he does not appear at all. They belong to Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, a spin-off corner built on his supporting characters. For completeness, here is where they landed with critics.
| Film | Year | RT critics | RT audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venom | 2018 | 31% | 80% |
| Venom: Let There Be Carnage | 2021 | 58% | 83% |
| Venom: The Last Dance | 2024 | 40% | 79% |
| Morbius | 2022 | 15% | 71% |
| Madame Web | 2024 | 10% | 53% |
| Kraven the Hunter | 2024 | 15% | 72% |
The pattern is consistent: critics were cold, audiences a little warmer, and the experiment wound down after Kraven the Hunter underperformed. Good films to argue about. Not Spider-Man movies.
What’s next after Brand New Day
Brand New Day is out and it enters this list at number two. Our full review covers why it lands there, and we’ve broken down its post-credits scene separately. The next Spider-Man film is Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse on 18 June 2027, which closes out the Miles Morales trilogy.
Worth saying plainly: number two is an early call. This list judges films on how they hold up rather than how they play on opening weekend, and Brand New Day has not had years to be tested the way the films around it have. It is placed on how good it is, not on how new it is, and it will be revisited.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Spider-Man movie?
Spider-Man 2 (2004). It is the only one where the character work, the villain, the set pieces and the theme all pull in the same direction, and the only one that needs no other film to work. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is second and the best of the modern run, Across the Spider-Verse is the best animated Spider-Man film, and No Way Home is the best experience. Spider-Man 2 is still the best film.
What is the worst Spider-Man movie?
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) holds the lowest critics score of any Spider-Man-titled film at 51%, and it is the one that ended Sony’s Amazing series. Spider-Man 3 (2007) has the lowest audience score, but it is remembered far more fondly, largely because of the memes.
How many Spider-Man movies are there?
As of August 2026 there are eleven films where Spider-Man is the lead: nine live-action and two animated. The most recent is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, released on 31 July 2026. Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse is due on 18 June 2027.
What order should I watch the Spider-Man movies in?
For the live-action films, release order works best, since No Way Home directly rewards having seen the Raimi and Webb films. The two Spider-Verse animations are a separate, self-contained story and can be watched on their own.
Is No Way Home the best Spider-Man movie?
It was comfortably the best time you could have had in a cinema with this character, and it held the franchise’s highest audience score at 97% until Brand New Day took it at 98%. Whether it is the best film is a different question, and the answer here is no. It sits third. It runs on nostalgia and the energy of a packed room, and both films above it run on themselves.
Who is the best Spider-Man actor?
Tobey Maguire is in the best films and Tom Holland has had the most room to develop, but Andrew Garfield gave the performance that most outstripped the material around it. He is also the only one of the three never to get a trilogy.
