In reply to Max Battcher.

I definitely don't want to throw a wet blanket on your optimism, but I'll just say I'm decidedly less optimistic. I haven't been impressed by anything Sony has been doing with comic book characters since the end of Spider-Man 2, which is the point at which that series started feeling less like Sam Raimi movies and more like Sony trying to build a franchise.

You're absolutely right that anything can happen after the reboot, but I'm just not very confident that it will. It seems like they could've fulfilled the contractual squabbles between Sony & the MCU in plenty of different ways that would've made it feel expansive, like they're building on the MCU version of the character. Instead, it just felt like they kept hitting Ctrl-Z on all of the interesting aspects of the Tom Holland version, to turn him back into exactly the same character as the previous two.

I was telling my friend that another sign of why I'm not confident in what Sony will do with the character is that Andrew Garfield KILLED IT in No Way Home. Just immediately appealing and endearing, seeming like he was having a lot of fun, and giving a genuinely moving performance when he needed to. So even with the great casting of him and the infinite-charisma-generator that is Emma Stone, they STILL couldn't make a version of Spider-Man that seemed interesting to me. I haven't seen either of the Venom movies, either, because they just seem gray and unappealing. Morbius even less so. And although Into The Spider-Verse was visually stunning and hilarious and exciting throughout, it still felt "slight" somehow, where none of the characters felt at all real to me.

I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, but at least for now I expect that Civil War-through-No Way Home is the only version of Spider-Man I'll ever be interested in.