Best! Summer! Blockbuster! Ever! ‘Spider-Man’ (Released: May 3, 2002)

The arrival of summer means the coming of summer blockbuster season, the four-month stretch when Hollywood’s splashiest, costliest, and most star-packed movies, dominate theaters. In our new summer series Best! Summer! Blockbuster! Ever! (That Was Released This Week), Decider will be looking at the past 40 years of Hollywood blockbusters to determine the best blockbuster released that week.

What makes a great blockbuster is a little different than what makes a great movie. A great blockbuster has to be a great movie, sure, but it also has to become part of the cultural conversation — and do so for reasons beyond sheer size. With enough a push and a handful of stars, a studio can effectively buy a big opening weekend. But who thinks fondly of Elysium (which topped the box office the weekend of August 9th, 2015)? And who can recall, without Googling, where Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End falls in the series? (It’s third, we think?)

A great blockbuster captures the public imagination and never lets go, pushing the Hollywood spectacle film forward and setting a standard for blockbusters that follow (or, failing that, a formula for them to imitate). That makes it easy to pick an easy winner for the first week of May: Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, which brought a beloved character to the big screen for the first time and helped create our superhero movie-dominated present.

Even if you have mixed feelings about the latter development, it’s hard not to love Spider-Man, in part because it’s made with such obvious love for the material. Working from a screenplay by David Koepp, Raimi looked to the classic Spider-Man comics for inspiration, staying true to both the origin story and early adventures created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko and the complicated personal relationships of the Lee / John Romita era that followed it.

Raimi stayed so true that some shots pay direct homage to old comics panels, but it’s the film’s ability to capture the spirit and, especially, the heightened emotions of classic Spider-Man stories that sets it apart. Superheroes were already undergoing a small renaissance when Lee and Ditko (and, in other titles like Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby) decided to fill them with flawed, troubled characters like Peter Parker in the early ’60s. By humanizing them, Marvel helped make superheroes relatable in ways they hadn’t been even at the height of their popularity in the 1940s. By doing the same for movie superheroes, Raimi’s Spider-Man helped do the same for what would become a superhero-fixated 21st century.

Finding a Spider-Man who could convincingly fight crime while swinging through the air and double as a dejected teenage outsider didn’t hurt either. Though already 26 when he made the movie, Tobey Maguire still had the look of a high schooler and the sensitive, open expression of a kid who’d had his lunch money taken one too many times. He’s convincing at every stage of his coming-of-superhero age, as he transforms from a put-upon geek to, however briefly, an arrogant jerk to humble servant of New York who protects from another being hiding behind a mask: the crazed Green Goblin (played by Willem Dafoe as a man not always in control of his own identity, not unlike Peter).

Just by faithfully translating Spider-Man from comics to film, the film’s an impressive feat, introducing many of the characters central to comics’ extended cast and folding them into a story that pits Spidey against one of his most famous foes. But Raimi and his cast, which includes Kirsten Dunst as a spirited but wounded Mary Jane Watson, makes sure both the story and the spirit of the comics make it to the screen intact, aided by a Raimi’s skilled visual sense — and stylistic daring still intact from his Evil Dead days — and digital effects that had (mostly) caught up with what could be done visually on a comics page. (The fully CGI shots of Spidey looks a little janky here, especially when compared to that of later films.)

Spider-Man connected in a big way, even more than the similarly minded X-Men two years before. It raked in enough money to land Spidey on the over of Time, paved the way for two sequels (one great, the other, eh…), and expanded the summer blockbuster territory itself, which had previously traditionally begun with Memorial Day weekend, though spring hits like The Matrix had suggested the window could broaden. (For perspective, the number-one movie this same weekend in 1992 was Basic Instinct, which had already been in theaters for weeks.) It also gave 2002 moviegoers the closest thing they had to a Beatles-coming-to-America-after-the-JFK-assassination moment: a big, beloved piece of pop culture to embrace after the trauma of 9/11. That the film featured a down-but-never-out hero powered by virtue and selflessness charged with protecting New York was probably no coincidence.

OTHER FIRST WEEKEND OF MAY TRIUMPHS: In May of 1983, Flashdance used a welder with dancing aspirations and a hit soundtrack to become a pop culture phenomenon. The following year, Police Academy helped make the ’80s safe for big, dumb comedies. The first weekend in May saw the ’90s debuts of Friday, The Craft, and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. After Spider-Man, superheroes would dominated the spot, starting with X2: X-Men United and carrying on through the MCU-heavy recent years, an era begun by the May 2, 2008 debut of Iron Man.

ABSOLUTELY NOT THE BEST! SUMMER! BLOCKBUSTER! EVER! (THAT WAS RELEASED THIS WEEK): Released April 30th, 2010 — but effectively a first-weekend-in-May movie — A Nightmare on Elm Street somehow distinguished itself as one of the worst 21st century horror remakes by making the franchise’s already creepy sexual undertones into explicit themes (and through the more traditional means of just not being nearly as good as the film it was remaking).

Keith Phipps writes about movies and other aspects of pop culture. You can find his work in such publications as The Ringer, Slate, Vulture, and Polygon. Keith also co-hosts the podcasts The Next Picture Show and Random Movie Night and lives in Chicago with his wife and child. Follow him on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Where to stream Spider-Man