The question of the entire Sony live-action Spider-Verse franchise is simply this: Who is Spider-Man in this world? Do we finally have the answer we’ve been searching for? Well, sort of. Thanks to Madame Web, we can do some math that might help us figure out who our Peter Parker is.
Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic when we meet her. She works with a man named Ben Parker (Adam Scott), who fans of Spider-Man may know better as “Uncle Ben.” The two are friends, and with little hints to Cassie’s connection to the Parker family, the movie establishes an important bit of information: Peter Parker was born in 2003, meaning … either math got messed up somewhere or this is now a completely different Peter Parker from the ones we’ve met before.
Ben is single in Madame Web, but it’s revealed that he met a woman that he likes. (She goes unnamed, but we can assume that is a hint at Aunt May.) What’s important here is that his brother, Richard Parker, is about to have a baby. Cassie goes to Mary Parker’s baby shower despite not knowing her and only really knowing her coworkers who happen to be there, and everyone is guessing Mary’s baby’s name, and we never get an answer.
Later, when the baby is born, their name is still never said. Unless there was some secret kid we don’t know, all of this was our way of seeing Peter Parker enter into the Sony-verse. So why does this make this baby a new Spider-Man? Because Tom Holland’s Peter was born in 2001.
So … technically Peter Parker is in this movie. He’s not Spider-Man, and he is literally hours old, but he does exist.
What does this mean for Spider-Man in the future of these movies?
Madame Web kind of doesn’t focus on the Spider-Man of it all. With Cassie’s ability to see into the future, you’d think that maybe she’d see what Peter is destined for, even as a baby. And she does make some quip about Mary’s future while in the hospital, but what we see at the end of the film is Cassie working with Spider-People Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced).
That means that we still don’t know what the deal is with Spider-Man in this universe of Sony characters or whether or not Madame Web even ties into movies like Venom and Morbius. This could have just been a series of nods to what makes the Spider-Man universe so fun while acknowledging just how many characters exist in the Spider-Man canon.
If this is the only Peter Parker we’re going to get out of the Sony movies, then so be it. But to answer the question of whether Spider-Man was in this movie? No, unless you get into semantics about Peter Parker’s future, but that’s a complicated web that only Cassie can manage.
(featured image: Sony Pictures)
