Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — the opening scene that honoured the original

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is widely considered the best Spider-Man film ever made — and one of the best animated films of the decade. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It introduced Miles Morales to mainstream audiences. It revolutionised what animated superhero cinema could look like.

But before any of that, it opens with a different Spider-Man's story. The one who came first. And it does something unusual: it treats that story — the Sam Raimi trilogy, the Tobey Maguire era — with complete, unironic affection.

What the opening scene does

The film opens with Peter Parker's origin told as a compressed, self-aware montage. The radioactive spider. Uncle Ben. With great power comes great responsibility. Mary Jane. The upside-down kiss. The wrestling match. All of it rendered in a slightly retro comic book style, narrated by Peter himself with the tone of someone who knows his story has been told many times.

"I'm Spider-Man," he says. "You know the story."

That line does a remarkable amount of work. It acknowledges that audiences have seen this origin story multiple times — in the Raimi films, in The Amazing Spider-Man, in the MCU's version. It doesn't try to retell it or reboot it. It just nods at it, honours it, and moves on.

The filmmakers had actually written a scene that would have included Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland together in one scene. It was cut because of anxiety about confusing audiences — a decision that, in hindsight, seems overly cautious for a film that went on to introduce six different Spider-People without anyone getting confused. But the opening sequence remains a tribute to all of them, and especially to the one who started it all.

Why Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man still matters

Tobey Maguire played Peter Parker in Sam Raimi's trilogy from 2002 to 2007. Those films defined Spider-Man for an entire generation. The first film was the highest-grossing film of 2002. Spider-Man 2 is still regularly cited as one of the greatest superhero films ever made.

Maguire's Peter Parker was nerdy, sincere, and genuinely burdened by his responsibility. He wasn't cool. He struggled. He lost. He cried. For a generation of kids who felt like outsiders, that Spider-Man felt like theirs.

Into the Spider-Verse understood this. By opening with that version of the story — by treating the Raimi aesthetic and the upside-down kiss and the wrestling match as things worth celebrating — the film told audiences that their Spider-Man wasn't being replaced. He was being honoured.

That's why this opening works. It's not nostalgia for its own sake. It's the film earning the right to introduce someone new by first acknowledging everything that came before.

What No Way Home did with the same material

Three years after Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: No Way Home did what the animated film had reportedly considered and then pulled back from: it put Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland in the same film together. The result was one of the highest-grossing films in history and a moment that felt, for a certain generation of Marvel fans, genuinely cathartic.

What's interesting, looking back, is how differently the two films handled the same emotional material. Into the Spider-Verse honoured the Raimi era through aesthetic reference and tonal affection — it didn't need the actor to make the tribute feel real. No Way Home brought the actual actors back and gave them scenes together, which worked partly because of Maguire and Garfield's natural warmth and partly because the film understood that what audiences wanted wasn't just nostalgia but closure. Maguire's Peter Parker gets to catch the villain who killed his uncle's equivalent. The wound gets addressed.

Spider-Verse's opening remains the more elegant tribute, though. It earns its emotion without spectacle — just a compressed montage, a self-aware narrator, and the quiet acknowledgement that this story has been told before and will be told again, and that's exactly the point. Every Spider-Man is the same story. Every generation gets their own version of it. The one who came first made all the others possible. The opening scene knows that, and says so in under three minutes, and then steps aside to let Miles Morales begin.