Teen angst under the mask
Superhero action takes a back seat as Peter comes of age
We’ve already seen five bigbudget Spider-Man films. Get ready for the first Peter Parker movie.
Tom Holland follows up his introduction as the wall-crawling Marvel hero in last May’s Captain
America: Civil War and digs into the daily life of the New York City teenager underneath the mask in
Spider-Man: Homecoming (in theaters July 7). Directed by Jon Watts ( Cop Car), the coming-ofage story features Peter attending his high school for gifted kids, trying to impress his new benefactor Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and also dealing with a pesky archenemy, the Vulture (Michael Keaton).
For Holland, it’s less an action movie and “more a character piece about this kid who’s struggling to talk to girls and also struggling to save the city,” says the 20-year-old British actor.
The first trailers will be unveiled online Thursday.
Homecoming begins with Peter wrestling with a return to his nor- mal life in Queens after being recruited by Stark and surviving his first huge superhero battle (see: Civil War). Taking the subway to school again for his sophomore year is tough for the kid.
“He literally just went to Europe with the coolest clique of them all,” says co-producer Eric Hauserman Carroll. “And now he’s back with the academic decathlon and the mathletes and going, ‘What am I doing here?’ ”
Both the previous Spidey incarnations — in the 2000s with Tobey Maguire and the more recent pair of Andrew Garfield movies — featured Peter getting his powers through a radioactive spider bite and his Uncle Ben’s wise words (“With great power comes great responsibility”) becoming a heroic mantra.
But Homecoming is skipping that backstory. The filmmakers want to focus on his life as a teen crushing on girls and navigating his formative years, albeit with really cool abilities.
“This is really a movie where Spider-Man’s not the finished article,” Holland says. “He really does learn, and he makes massive mistakes. It’s nice to see a kid do that and then try to rectify those mistakes.”
Peter is also still figuring out the high-tech suit Stark gave him. The getup fans saw in Civil War “can do a lot more than he even realizes right now,” says producer and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. In Homecoming, “you begin to see just how much Tony Stark loves bells and whistles.”
The young supporting cast includes Jacob Batalon as Peter’s best friend Ned Leeds, Laura Harrier as his dream girl Liz Allan, Tony Revolori as bully Flash Thompson and Zendaya as their classmate Michelle. Marisa Tomei reprises her
Civil War role as Peter’s Aunt May, and Keaton co-stars as the movie’s resident bad guy Adrian Toomes, an average Joe with criminal tendencies and a wicked wing suit.
“The first time we see the Vulture is terrifying,” Holland teases. “It’s like a horror movie: really scary, very intense and shocking.”
The Spidey foe is different from other Marvel baddies such as Thanos and Ultron, Watts says. “It’s fun to think that if SpiderMan is a regular kid who becomes a superhero, there’s got to be a bunch of regular guys who become supervillains, too.”