And there will be more old superheroes returning from the dead in forthcoming DC effort The Flash, in which we are promised the return of the Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck takes on Batman. We will surely see Dafoe as the Green Goblin again, if the creatives out there have their heads screwed on properly. Marvel and Sony got this so right that there is now talk of future movies starring Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as Spidey. There are three Spider-Men from different eras, two of whom make such a welcome return that it’s like meeting a dear old friend again for a beer after decades apart. There are returning villains we thought we’d never see on the big screen again, such as Willem Dafoe’s cackling Green Goblin and Alfred Molina’s tragic Doc Ock. Ultimately, Jon Watts’s film, which recently overtook Avatar to become the third-highest-grossing film of all time at the all-important US box office, is 148 minutes of incredibly well-conceived and detailed Spidey fan-service. The staged meme was shot to publicise the digital release date of No Way Home on 22 March, and tapping into fans’ nostalgia for old Spider-Man shows couldn’t be more fitting. This film’s got legs … Tom Holland as Spider-Man and Alfred Molina as Doc Ock in No Way Home. It’s since been used millions of times in social media posts, often to illustrate moments when celebrities meet each other ( according to the Know Your Meme website). The image recalls a famous still from episode 19 of the 1967-1970 animated Spider-Man show, in which a Spidey-impostor – clue, he’s really a criminal – tries to impersonate the masked wallcrawler. And all it took was a staged meme featuring all three webslingers from global megasmash Spider-Man: No Way Home pointing at each other.
This week Marvel and Sony have shown how to do fan service properly. The best/worst of them ended up being the legendary (for all the wrong reasons) line: “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Up there with Jackson’s famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech about the path of the righteous man it really wasn’t.
Back then, somebody high up thought it would be a really good idea to start borrowing lines for Jackson to say (while fighting off those airborne reptiles) from a hyped-up geek community who had been spending most of their spare time discussing the unreleased movie on fan forums and blogs. F an service has come a long way since 2006, when studio New Line allowed its audience to basically crowd-think the entirety of Samuel L Jackson action epic Snakes on a Plane.