How Spider-Man 3 Can Avoid The Mistakes Of Wonder Woman 1984

Warning: There are SPOILERS ahead for Wonder Woman 1984.

With Spider-Man: Homecoming 3‘s introducing a complicated multiverse, it must avoid the mistakes of Wonder Woman 1984 while doing so. The Wonder Woman sequel hit theaters and HBO Max on Christmas Day and reactions were mixed, and that’s putting it as generously as possible. The sequel time-jumped from the first movie and, this time, found Diana (Gal Gadot) smack in 1984, working as a cultural anthropologist at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Through complicated means involving a magical, wish-granting stone, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) was resurrected, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) was transformed into the villain Cheetah, and villain Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) almost destroyed the world. Honestly, nothing out of the ordinary for a comic book movie plot.

The problem, however, wasn’t the general plot but how it was executed. The movie was unnecessarily long, with scenes that could have easily been cut without the movie losing anything vital. The story was also needlessly complicated, doing far too much to explain developments that would only ever happen in a comic book movie, anyway. Steve Trevor, for example, didn’t just come back, he came back by being spirited into the body of another man for reasons that went completely unexplained in the story’s overexertion to completely justify the circumstances of his resurrection. But WW84 already having a magical, wish-granting stone should have been enough to explain his existence. There was no need to add explanations on top of that.

It’s a lesson Spider-Man: Homecoming 3 would do well to learn. With confirmed reports that Jamie Foxx’s Electro will return and Alfred Molina will also return as Doc Ock, and unconfirmed reports that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield will be reprising their iterations of the webslinger, the third Marvel-Sony Spider-Man movie is set to open up a crossover multiverse in a huge way. While the concept of a multiverse isn’t new to the MCU, what Spider-Man: Homecoming 3 is hoping to accomplish with its story is wildly ambitious, if all the reported castings prove accurate. It’s a story that could easily go sideways and become an absolute mess of too many moving parts and not enough cohesion.

To avoid this, next year’s Spider-Man movie must remember what drives Marvel movies: character. Always character. To Marvel’s credit (and sometimes its detriment), its movies have tended to hand-wave the exact details of its increasingly complex Infinity Stones arc culminating in Avengers: Endgame‘s massive time travel retcon of the Snap. How did the Avengers figure out how to use time travel to defeat Thanos, exactly? Because… Quantum Realm comic book science stuff, that’s how. It doesn’t matter that it’s a scant explanation. Marvel knows its IP better than any other studio and understands, as Wonder Woman 1984 seemed to forget, that as long as the story is true to its characters, audiences will come along for the ride even if the plot is light on details. Marvel movies explain just enough to get audiences to willingly suspend their disbelief, then move on.

As its character lineup has grown more crowded, fans have understandably worried that Spider-Man: Homecoming 3 will be a muddled mess. But if it sticks to Marvel’s “who not how” approach to storytelling, it can avoid the pitfalls of Wonder Woman 1984‘s overly-complicated plot that took too much attention away from Wonder Woman herself. Having two other Spider-Men and multiple villains could easily overshadow Tom Holland’s Peter Parker. Hopefully, Marvel (and Sony) keep in mind Holland’s Spider-Man is a large component of the MCU moving forward and position him as such. Maguire and Garfield will be fun additions, but they’re not the future as Holland is. As long as Spider-Man: Homecoming 3 keeps the focus on the MCU Spidey and doesn’t bog down the movie by over-explaining how the Spider-Men of alternate realities are colliding, it should be just fine.

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