CBS aired a live action Spider-Man movie on a September night in 1977, a few months after my brother took me to Star Wars and rearranged my entire childhood, and I sat about three feet from the screen for the whole thing. It was not good. Nicholas Hammond climbed walls on what was obviously a rope, and the big menace was a hypnotist instead of a man with mechanical arms welded to his spine. I did not care even a little, because for ninety minutes a skinny kid who got pushed around had powers and spent them on people who were about to get hurt.
I leaned DC in those days and my MEGO shelf showed it, right down to the Wonder Woman I was nervous about holding up to my dad at Roses. Spider-Man got a pass anyway, because he was the only one of them who seemed like he might go to my school. Superman was a god who had decided to like us. Batman was a rich man with a hobby. Peter Parker was broke and his boss screamed at him and he could not get a sentence out around a girl he liked, and he still went out every night and stood between strangers and whatever was coming for them. Every kid who has ever been shoved into a locker gets that pitch by about the third page.
CBS was turning into the superhero network that year whether it wanted the job or not, having scooped up Wonder Woman after ABC let Lynda Carter go, with The Incredible Hulk two months out and Doctor Strange and Captain America coming behind it. Superman was coming to theaters the following Christmas. As far as I was concerned the entire culture had been reorganized around my personal interests.
Then CBS killed it. Spider-Man finished nineteenth for the season and got cancelled anyway, along with Wonder Woman, because executives were worried about the network being branded a place for comic book nonsense. Hulk was allowed to live until 1982 on the grounds that he tested well with adults.
That was the first time somebody decided Spider-Man was a problem to be managed by people who had no idea what he was for. It would not be the last.
Forty-nine years later
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened on July 31 and took in $360 million domestically in three days, which is the biggest opening weekend in the history of the American box office, and it passed a billion dollars worldwide in six. It got an A CinemaScore and a 98 from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
And a substantial chunk of MAGA responded by laying the movie out on a table and going through it with tweezers. A photograph of Tom Holland standing beside his own wife is interracial propaganda, and Zendaya possibly out-earning a supporting actor is a pay equity emergency. A woman asking a masked man whether he has a boyfriend is a message being pushed on children, and one anti-woke rating site has the whole thing filed under Slightly Woke while another calls it Woke-ish and recommends it anyway.
None of that means Spider-Man became a radical in tights this summer. It means an entire industry has trained its customers to go through a movie the way a customs officer goes through a suitcase, and to treat every Black woman and every gay reference as something that has to be opened and searched.
He has always been this guy
Stan Lee was a mid-century liberal who never once pretended comics floated above politics. In a 1968 Soapbox column he called bigotry and racism the deadliest social ills of the era and told his readers to judge people one at a time, and Marvel still reprints that column as part of the legacy. The year before, he and John Romita had introduced Joe Robertson at the Daily Bugle, a Black editor who arrived as a man with authority and a spine rather than as relief.
In 1971 the Nixon administration’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare asked Lee to write about drug abuse, and he did it across Amazing Spider-Man #96 through #98. The Comics Code Authority refused to stamp the issues, because the Code did not permit drugs to appear in a comic book under any circumstances, and Marvel ran them anyway with no seal on the cover. They sold, and the Code never got its authority back. Spider-Man was breaking the industry’s censorship regime over a social problem before most of the men currently making anti-woke reaction videos were born.
His central principle is not exactly buried in subtext either. Power creates responsibility, which is a demand that whoever has the strength in a given room account for the people who do not have any. It may not fit cleanly on a party bumper sticker, but it sure as hell was never a hymn to selfishness or social hierarchy.
None of this was a problem when we were kids. The politics sat right there on the page and nobody’s dad wrote a letter about it. What changed is that a whole industry grew up around telling conservatives what to be furious about this week, and it has payroll to meet.
This is not one controversy, it is an ecosystem
There is no single conservative verdict on Brand New Day, because they have never needed one. The contradictions do not slow anybody down, since the only part they all agree on is that a Spider-Man movie has to clear a political inspection before anybody is allowed to enjoy it.
Some outlets want the film as proof that Marvel finally came to its senses, while the rating sites keep inventorying its offenses. Anonymous social accounts with thousands of followers supply the racism and the misogyny in the plain language the bigger operations will not put under a byline, and then influencers harvest those posts and reaction channels turn them into forty minutes of content. Somewhere in there a man with a cartoon avatar and 340 followers decides what forty thousand people are angry about on Tuesday.
He cannot simply swing around New York and sell two billion dollars in tickets. He has to file paperwork with men who review movies for a living and have not been to a theater since March.
The horror of an ordinary married couple
Start with the photographs, because that is genuinely where this began. Tom Holland and Zendaya, who are married to each other, appeared together in promotional material, and men on Reddit and X described it as interracial relationship propaganda.
There is no subtext here to excavate. They skip the storytelling complaint entirely and say straight out that the movie is pushing an interracial agenda, and one of them went ahead and posted that race mixing is evil, which at least has the virtue of honesty and saves the rest of us a great deal of time.
Nothing was preached at these men. Two people stood next to each other. A white couple can appear in a photograph without anyone demanding to know what message is being sent, and the only variable that changed here is the color of the woman’s skin, which the poster understood perfectly well and was in fact the entire reason he opened his laptop.
This is also the permanent answer to the forced diversity complaint. No amount of subtlety was ever going to satisfy people who experience the visible existence of a Black woman as an intrusion. The men looking at that photograph brought their own politics to it and then accused the picture of starting the fight.
Zendaya’s paycheck is suddenly a feminist emergency
Then there is the money, and it is worth slowing down here because the complaint is dumber than the people making it appear to understand. A woman got paid more than a man. That is the grievance. There is nothing else under it when you turn it over.
The figures everyone has been circulating are unconfirmed estimates from aggregators rather than anybody’s actual payroll, and they put Zendaya somewhere between five and eight million and Jon Bernthal between four and six, which is close enough that the outrage may be running on a gap that does not exist. Bernthal is a hell of a character actor with people who will watch him do anything. Zendaya has two Emmys for Euphoria and was the youngest woman ever to win Lead Actress in a Drama at twenty-four before coming back and becoming the youngest and the first Black actress to win it twice, and she is Chani in the Dune pictures and she carried Challengers on her own, and this summer she is playing Athena for Christopher Nolan. She is one of maybe three actors under thirty who can put people in seats on her name alone, so of course she costs more than the guy playing the Punisher, and she would cost more than most of the men in this industry if you sat them all down and made them bid against her.
Meanwhile those same estimates have Tom Holland at fifteen to twenty million with backend participation stacked on top of it, which is two to four times what Zendaya got, and not one of these guys has managed a syllable about that. They found pay equity the week it could be aimed at a Black woman, and they will have lost interest in it again by Labor Day.
Spider-Man might have a boyfriend, everybody panic
Consider the scale of what set this one off. Nobody made Peter Parker gay. Nobody went back and rewrote sixty years of him mooning over redheads like Mary Jane. A woman in a bathhouse asks a man in a full-face mask whether he has a girlfriend or a boyfriend, he does not answer, the scene ends, and grown men went home and typed about it.
Worth It or Woke files that single line as the most explicit woke element in a 145-minute movie and marks it with a weary “(oh brother),” which is the sound a man makes upon discovering that gay people are permitted to be mentioned in his presence. The whole complaint is that the movie declined to pretend they are not out there.
This is what keep politics out of it has always meant. Heterosexuality can saturate every frame of a picture without anybody calling it messaging, and then one character raises the possibility that a masked stranger might date men and the hazmat team gets deployed.
The same review takes its swipe at modern female characters whose actions are supposedly always blameless, and it never gets around to naming which woman in this movie should have been punished, or for what, or what punishment would have been sufficient. That vagueness is not an oversight. What they are tracking is how much sympathy and money the women in this movie were allowed to walk away with, and the answer is always too much.
The scorecard tells on itself
If you want to watch this operate at the retail level, spend four minutes on isitwoke.io.
The site scores Brand New Day a 58 and files it under Slightly Woke, arriving there through signals with names like legacy rewriting and tokenistic characters, each graded out of twenty, topped with an AI-written analysis explaining that the movie buckles under its own ideological ambitions and that Peter Parker’s arc is marred by a sense of moral superiority. Directly beneath the score, the page states what the verdict is based on, and the answer is published title analysis. It also gives the date the analysis was last updated, which is July 22, and the movie came out on July 31.
A machine read a title and a cast list, generated five paragraphs of confident cultural criticism about a film that had not screened for a single human being, and then rated its own confidence in that judgment as high. The footer notes that the site is for entertainment and that “We’re not your film professor,” which is the only honest line on the domain.
They have been at war with Rotten Tomatoes over this exact behavior for seven years, and they lost that one too. In February of 2019 the Captain Marvel page got buried under negative audience scores left by people who had not seen the movie, and Rotten Tomatoes responded by shutting off pre-release commenting and killing the Want to See number, and by that May the site was verifying ticket purchases before an audience rating would count at all. Ghostbusters and The Last Jedi had already been through the same thing at the same hands. They called it censorship, when all the site had done was ask for a receipt from people who had proven they would grade a movie without watching it.
Seven years on they have not moved an inch. The theory going around about The Odyssey last month was that Rotten Tomatoes was scrubbing negative reviews on the studio’s orders and that the raw data showed the real audience score was 56 rather than 97, and a few of them went further and insisted the sold-out showings were fraudulent bulk ticket buys staged to fake a hit.
They graded a film nobody had watched, and when millions of people did watch one and liked it, they decided the numbers were forged. A suspicion score gets attached to a product based on who appears in it, and then that score gets rented out to anybody who needs to feel robbed on a schedule, which is a business and not a form of criticism.
Canon is the necktie they put on for company
The canon complaint is the respectable one, the one that sounds like a principle, and it lets a fifty-year-old man tell himself he is defending sixty years of storytelling rather than admitting what is actually chewing on him.
These are people who sat through the clone saga without filing a grievance. They sat through Peter’s marriage being erased by a literal deal with the devil, and through two full reboots inside of ten years, and not one of them made a video about the desecration of the source material. Comic characters have been rewritten across decades and creative teams, and the fans absorbed all of it without a word.
Ask one of them which specific issue established the canon they are defending and watch the tab-switching begin. They are not protecting a text. They could not tell you who inked it.
The canon only becomes sacred at the exact moment a change hands something to somebody who was not getting anything before, which is a hell of a coincidence for a principle.
Even the praise is a claim of ownership
The funniest part of the whole cycle is that the same movement is busy annexing the film. The Daily Wire has been running pieces praising Brand New Day for avoiding the woke road and forced identity politics, and celebrating its treatment of loneliness and belonging and Spider-Man’s belief in the goodness and sanctity of life.
Anybody is free to be moved by a story about loneliness. The comedy is in the flag-planting, because these are the same people who spent two years telling you Hollywood despises them, and the instant a Marvel movie makes a billion dollars they turn up to claim they built it. A success means the culture surrendered to them. Zendaya’s paycheck and a gay joke mean the culture is coming for them. They will run both of those through the same mouth in the same week and never once notice, because the conclusion was decided before the movie existed and the movie is only there to supply the evidence.
Enjoying the movie was never going to be enough for these people. They want custody.
What Spider-Man actually did in 1988
Before we get to what the government did with him this month, sit with what Marvel published thirty-eight years ago.
In Spectacular Spider-Man #137 and #138, Gerry Conway and Sal Buscema told a story about undocumented immigrants in New York living in terror of deportation, because the governments they fled will kill them the moment they land. A costumed thug called the Tarantula hunts them down on behalf of one of those governments. A State Department agent is quietly helping him do it. Captain America is recruited into the manhunt after being told that Spider-Man is protecting a terrorist. J. Jonah Jameson spends the story stoking hysteria in his paper, and Peter spends it standing between a woman who has just lost her amnesty and the men who want her handed over.
Gerry Conway also created the Punisher, and he has spent years telling police departments to take Frank Castle’s skull off their trucks, on the grounds that the character is an outlaw and a criminal and that cops adopting him as a mascot is a confession that the system already failed. The man who wrote the immigration story and the man who invented the skull are the same man, and he has been perfectly clear about what he meant by both of them.
August 6
On August 6, six days after the movie opened, the official White House Instagram account posted a four-image carousel.
The first panel is a gloved hand firing a web. The web runs across the next two. The last one shows a line of people with their hands bound behind them, wrapped in webbing, standing in front of a uniformed ICE agent, under text promising that criminal illegal aliens will be caught and deported. The caption reads “Your friendly neighborhood ICE agents.”
The images appear to be AI-generated. Nobody willing to draw that by hand would have been asked to.
Peter Parker’s whole moral architecture is that power over other people creates an obligation toward the ones who have none of it. The federal government took the phrase he uses to describe being somebody’s neighbor and pasted it onto an agency that pulls people off sidewalks. It did this during the theatrical run of a film whose plot turns on a government office grabbing enhanced people off the street and holding them in cells, imagery that multiple critics recognized on sight.
Neither Marvel nor Sony has said anything.
I do not think the people who made that post care that his history contradicts them. I think that is the point of it. You cannot argue with a character who has been saying the same thing since 1962, so you put him in the ad instead.
Do not call it fringe
The easy move now is to note that the worst of this came from anonymous accounts with cartoon avatars, and to go on about your day.
That is precisely how the machine keeps running. QAnon began in anonymous message board sludge and ended up on campaign merchandise and in the president’s own reposts, and none of those ideas became significant at the moment a respectable person picked one up. Respectable people picked them up because years of repetition had already assembled an audience that would pay to hear them repeated.
We do not have to reach back to 2017 for the demonstration. The pipeline ran its full length in about nine days this time. An automated site graded the movie before anybody had seen it, review channels sorted its contents into offenses, anonymous accounts supplied the racism the larger outlets will not print under their own bylines, and then the White House put Spider-Man in an ICE ad. That is a description of a week and a half in August.
What he actually did wrong
Spider-Man’s crime is that his world has room in it for everybody and always has.
The house Lee and Ditko built in 1962 was one where the kid nobody picked for anything turned out to be the one who showed up, and where a person got measured by who he was willing to stand in front of. An interracial couple does not violate a word of that. Neither does a woman with a large paycheck and a real part in the story. Neither does a trans actor named Maikol Roque playing a cop’s son in a billion-dollar movie, which happened this month and which nobody noticed except the people who were glad about it.
Politics did not break into this franchise in 2026. The change happened out in the audience, where a well-funded outrage economy spent a decade teaching people to experience inclusion as theft and to hear empathy as an insult, until the same values they cheered at nine years old came back sounding like an accusation.
Nobody betrayed the kid sitting three feet from the television in 1977. He got exactly the hero he was promised, and that hero has been consistent to the point of monotony about who he shows up for. What all this money and effort has managed to accomplish is convincing some of those kids, now in their fifties, that a world with room for everyone is a world that took something from them.
They were always welcome in it. Their real objection is that everyone else is welcome too.
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