Tom Holland And Zendaya Were Told Not To Date (But Did Anyway), Plus 26 More Fascinating Tidbits From Every “Spider-Man” Movie

Spider-Man (2002)

1.

Four Spider-Man costumes were stolen from the Los Angeles set of Spider-Man, and a reward of $25,000 was offered to anyone who could recover them. A spokesperson said at the time, “We consider these costumes valuable property and we hope this reward will help to get them back.”

After a year and a half of investigating, Robert Hughes and Jeffrey Glenn Gustafson were charged with the theft. Gustafson had previously worked as a security guard for Sony and Warner Brothers. Each stolen Spidey suit was valued at $50,000; three of them were recovered in New York and Los Angeles, with the fourth being located in Japan. Hughes and Gustafson were also linked at the time to the 1996 theft of a Batman costume worth $150,000.

2.

According to DVD commentary from John Dykstra, the movie’s head of visual effects, the scene where Peter catches Mary Jane and the contents of her lunch tray wasn’t the result of CGI, but real stunt work performed by Tobey Maguire. He said it took 156 takes, and Kirsten Dunst (who played Mary Jane) recalled that the tray was attached to Maguire’s hand with “sticky glue stuff.”

3.

Hugh Jackman told the Huffington Post that he was going to make a cameo appearance as Wolverine in the movie, “whether it was a gag or just to walk through the shot or something,” but that it didn’t happen for a surprisingly mundane reason: Nobody could find his costume.

4.

On May 5th, 2002, Spider-Man became the first movie ever to make more than $100 million during its opening weekend. It made $39.4 million on its opening day, May 3rd.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

5.

Tobey Maguire was nearly recast due to an old back injury that started acting up following his work on 2003’s Seabiscuit. At the time, there were rumors that the back injury was a fake concocted by Maguire’s team to get their star a bigger paycheck. He told IGN, “First of all, this is a back condition I’ve had for three years or four years, on and off. Sometimes it doesn’t really bother me at all. Sometimes it bothers me a little. Sometimes it bothers me a lot. … I felt it was my responsibility to disclose my back discomfort to the studio, to the insurance company and to the filmmakers, which I did. They were understandably concerned.”

He went on, “After I reported the stuff to them and told them about my condition, my back started getting better. I told them about it and within about a week my back got better than it had been in three years or so. … I did the film and it didn’t bother me throughout the whole filming. As a matter of fact, it was easier than Seabiscuit and it was easier than Spider-Man 1.”

6.

Alfred Molina told IGN that Dr. Otto Octavius’s mechanical arms were controlled by a team of 16 puppeteers, “15 guys and one woman,” and their movements were choreographed by Eric Hayden.

Molina said, “The puppeteers and myself worked together very closely over a series of weeks to try [and] develop a vocabulary of movement, a language if you like, so we could do great big things like push a hole through a building, but at the same time do delicate things like taking off a pair of glasses or like lighting a cigar. Even one shot we did, I don’t think we ever used it, but one of the tentacles actually came out and wiped away a tear. So we had a really wide range of possibilities.”

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

7.

Sam Raimi studied 12 different varieties of sand under a microscope in order to bring the villainous Sandman to life. He told Wired, “I had people bring in 12 different kinds of sand — this is where people think the movie industry is insane — so I could look at it.”

Raimi went on, “I saw California beach sand, Mojave desert sand. We ended up picking Arizona sand because it looks exactly like ground corncobs. The reason that’s important is that when you bury people alive in hundreds and hundreds of pounds of sand, they’ll be squished. You need something lightweight like corncobs, so air can get through and the actors and stuntmen won’t be crushed.” Figuring out the Sandman took two-and-a-half years of effort from 30 visual effects technicians.

8.

Despite his evident enthusiasm for sand, Sam Raimi was less than thrilled by Spider-Man 3 as a whole. In 2021, Raimi told Collider about his hesitation taking on another superhero directing gig with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness after the poor reception of the third Spidey film.

Said Raimi, “I didn’t know that I could face it again because it was so awful, having been the director of Spider-Man 3. The Internet was getting revved up and people disliked that movie and they sure let me know about it. So, it was difficult to take back on. … I didn’t think I would be doing another superhero movie. It just happened.”

9.

Ben Kingsley was cast as the Vulture in Spider-Man 3, but while his contract was being negotiated, his role was cut because producer Avi Arad wanted the movie’s antagonist to be Venom, instead.

10.

…Speaking of which, Avi Arad told Screen Rant in 2018 that he regretted insisting on Venom’s presence in the film. Arad said, “In all fairness, I’ll take the guilt because of what Sam Raimi used to say in all of these interviews feeling guilty that I forced him into it. And you know what I learned? Don’t force anybody into anything.”

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

11.

Sally Field, who played Aunt May in both of the Amazing Spider-Man movies, revealed in a 2016 appearance on The Howard Stern Show that she took the role not because she enjoyed superhero movies, but as a favor to her friend Laura Ziskin, a producer who died from breast cancer soon after the movie was finished.

Field said, “We knew it would be her last film, and she was my first producing partner, and she was spectacular.” About the role of Aunt May, Field didn’t mince words. She said she struggled to “find a three-dimensional character” in May, and added, “You work it as much as you can, but you can’t put 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”

12.

Director Marc Webb told Time that Stan Lee tried to pitch lines for his (ultimately silent) cameo appearance in the film. Apparently, he wanted to say, “Oh, Dostoevsky. He’s like the Russian Stan Lee.” Which, in all fairness, is a pretty great line.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

13.

Due to how much he sweat in his Green Goblin costume, Dan Dehaan lost 7 pounds in two days while filming The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

He told Vanity Fair, “Basically, the first day they just had to pour buckets of ice water down my suit, but it was literally turning to steam — that was how hot my body was. The next day they got me this cooling vest — I wore it underneath the suit, it has these tubes so in between takes I would hook up to a cooler full of ice water and it would pump ice water through me and keep my core cooler. But I lost seven pounds in two days of filming! Which was pretty much all the weight I’d put on for the movie!”

14.

For a sequence set in New York City’s Times Square, director Marc Webb told Den of Geek that they spent three nights filming in the real location, then “built our own version in Long Island.”

Webb went on, “We created an environment that’s scaled to life size. And it was massive. There wasn’t enough equipment in New York to do it. We had to fly equipment in from Los Angeles and Canada to achieve what we needed to achieve. It was logistically by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do.”

15.

Alas, yet another Spidey sequel left broken hearts in its wake. In a 2016 Variety “Actors on Actors” interview, Andrew Garfield said he “got heartbroken a little bit” by the process of working on the films.

Garfield said, “There’s something about being that young in that kind of machinery which I think is really dangerous. I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America really, it’s a corporate enterprise mostly. … I found that really, really tricky. I signed up to serve the story, and to serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart.”

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

16.

To prepare for the role of Peter Parker, Tom Holland shadowed a student for two days at the Bronx High School of Science — the real world equivalent to the fictional Midtown School of Science and Technology — in February 2016.

The student Holland shadowed was a senior named Arun Bishop. While he was “enrolled,” Holland posed as Bishop’s cousin Ben, used an American accent, and had an elaborate backstory involving a father who was in the military. Only the teachers and a few other members of the faculty knew “Ben”‘s true identity. On day two, however, Holland attempted to tell some other students that he was Spider-Man, though few of them believed him until they looked up his (real) name on their phones. Bishop said, “It was crazy; nobody recognized him.”

17.

According to Variety, Robert Downey Jr. earned $10 million for his role in Spider-Man: Homecoming. And according to IMDb, he appeared onscreen for seven-and-a-half minutes. That works out to around $1.33 million per minute of screen time.

18.

Karen, aka the voice in Spider-Man’s suit, is voiced by Jennifer Connelly. Connelly is married to Paul Bettany, the voice of JARVIS, aka the voice in Iron Man’s suit. (Bettany also, of course, plays Vision.)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

20.

Producers Chris Miller and Phil Lord told Den of Geek that part of the reason they were attracted to this project was the opportunity to develop an entirely new visual language that was heavily influenced by comic book artwork.

Miller said, “It ended up being a very complicated mashing of CG animation and 2D hand-drawn animation and a bunch of new software to render textures in a stylistic and hand-painted style. The end result was that any frame that you pause will look like a painting, done by an artist, by hand. That was what we wanted to do, sort of honor the legacy that it came from.”

21.

In the same interview, Miller and Lord revealed that the first draft of the script ended with the arrival of Dr. Strange. Lord said, “It was the first draft, like three years ago. It ended with Doctor Strange. Literally, the last frame was Dr. Strange, going, ‘Hello.'”

22.

Rodney Rothman, one of the film’s three co-directors, emailed Edgar Wright to ask him if he wanted to come up with a spoof version of one of his movies to add as a background gag. In the email, Rothman wrote, “I want to do subway and bus ads for movies that don’t exist in our world but theoretically could. … It can be a meaningless title. Basically a movie made [and] written by an alternate universe version of you.”

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

23.

In an interview with Howard Stern, Jake Gyllenhaal said that he was so nervous on his first day of filming that he forgot his lines in a scene with Tom Holland and Samuel L. Jackson. Gyllenhaal said, “That acting is hard. All of it. That world is enormous. And I joined that world way into that run; a train that was already moving. Normally I come in way early on and I get to figure it out. … And I remember not being able to remember my lines. I was the wooden board. And they were like, ‘Woah.'”

24.

J.K. Simmons makes a cameo appearance as J. Jonah Jameson, the role he played in the Raimi trilogy, in this movie’s first post-credits scene, and the filmmakers were very keen to keep his appearance a secret.

Director Jon Watts told Collider that he waited until the very last minute to ask Simmons, to decrease the chance of his cameo leaking. Watts said, “So we waited until the very, very last second and called him up, and he came by and he was, ‘Wait, what? You want me to do what?’ It took him a second to understand, but as we pitched the idea he was totally on board and he really loved getting to be the person who finally outs Peter Parker.”

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

25.

Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal told the New York Times that she told Tom Holland and Zendaya, as well as Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, not to date each other soon after they were cast. Both couples promptly ignored her instruction. (For the record, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst also dated, though Pascal doesn’t mention telling them not to.)

Pascal said, “I took Tom and Zendaya aside, separately, when we first cast them and gave them a lecture. Don’t go there — just don’t. Try not to. I gave the same advice to Andrew and Emma. It can just complicate things, you know? And they all ignored me.”

26.

Set decorator Rosemary Brandenburg told House Beautiful that the film’s set designers modeled the dungeon of the Sanctum Sanctorum, aka Dr. Strange’s headquarters, after a basement in the Vatican.

27.

And finally: Jacob Batalon, who plays Peter’s best friend Ned, told the Hollywood Reporter that Alfred Molina asked him for an autographed photo. At first, Batalon thought Molina was kidding, but it turns out that Molina’s stepdaughter is a big fan of him, so Batalon happily supplied the autograph.