Tom Holland Credits Both Marvel and Sony With Making His Spider-Man so Special

In the days after Sony and Marvel announced their split, Spider-Man: Far From Home star Tom Holland took the stage at Keystone Comic Con to talk about…well, anything but the deal. Like D23, fans at the convention were reportedly discouraged from asking the actor about the news of the day, but that didn’t mean that he did not have plenty to say about the past, present, and future of his take on Spider-Man. Along the way, fans asked him what differentiated his take from the ones that came before him — specifically the live-action feature film performances by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.

The star had a pretty thoughtful take on the difference, and emphasized that while the Marvel Cinematic Universe certainly helped differentiate his own Spider-Man from the ones realized by other actors, there are bigger things that define Spider-Man — and he has tried to focus on some of those things.

“I was obviously much younger than Tobey and Andrew were,” Holland told fans at Keystone Comic Con. “We really tried to hone in on the high school thing, and for us, we tried to make a film about a regular kid with irregular problems. And what makes our version of Peter Parker and Spider-Man so special is he’s like the most relatable superhero there’s ever been. It’s hard to relate to Tony Stark because he’s a billionaire, Captain America’s a super soldier, Thor’s a god, but Peter Parker is just a kid from Queens. So making him this person that every single person in the room can relate to, and then what Jon Watts did so well is casting such a diverse such a diverse group of people to play his best friends. Everyone in the world can relate to our movies in some way, shape or form. So it wasn’t just my doing that made it so different. It was the creatives at Sony, Marvel and Jon Watts.”

Holland already has a sense for what his third stand-alone Spider-Man movie is, and that will combine with more planned Spidey films in Sony’s upcoming portfolio, including Venom 2 (directed by MCU veteran Andy Serkis) and the upcoming Morbius film starring Jared Leto.

Sony possesses the movie rights to roughly 900 Marvel Comics characters and is now in various stages of planning on numerous Spidey spinoffs, including Morbius, Kraven the Hunter and Black Cat. Whatever characters are planned for Spider-Man 3, Holland said the next movie will be “something very different.”