Spider-ManSave

The film opens with a voiceover from Peter Parker — a thin, bookish 17-year-old high school student in Queens, New York. He lives with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, his parents having died in a plane crash years earlier. Peter is bullied by Flash Thompson and his friends at Midtown Science High School. He has been quietly in love with his next-door neighbor Mary Jane Watson — a redheaded aspiring actress whose father is verbally abusive — since they were in fourth grade. Peter's only real friend is Harry Osborn, the wealthy son of OsCorp magnate Norman Osborn. The three of them ride a school bus to a science field trip at Columbia University, where the genetics department is showcasing genetically engineered super-spiders.

During the field trip, Peter is bitten on the hand by an escaped genetically modified spider. By the next morning, his vision has improved to the point where he no longer needs glasses. His muscles have firmed. His body has restructured. At school the next day, Peter discovers he can produce silk-thread webbing from his wrists, climb sheer walls, leap impossible distances, and avoid danger by an instinctive precognitive sense. Walking home, he confronts Flash and easily handles him in front of the entire student body. He tells no one. Meanwhile, at OsCorp Industries, Norman Osborn is under enormous pressure: his company's military contract is being canceled. He decides to test his experimental human performance enhancer on himself. The serum kills his lab assistant Stromm and makes Norman violently insane. He awakens in his Manhattan brownstone with no memory of having killed Stromm.

Peter, increasingly aware of his powers, designs a plan to fund his crush on Mary Jane: he enters a public pro-wrestling tournament under the alias "the Human Spider" against the brutal Bone Saw McGraw. He wins the prize money in three minutes by pinning Bone Saw with webs to the ceiling. The promoter, however, refuses to pay the agreed-upon $3,000, only $100. Peter leaves the office. Moments later, a thief robs the same office. Peter, still angry about the unfair payment, deliberately allows the thief to escape. That night, walking home, Peter discovers that the thief carjacked Uncle Ben's car. Uncle Ben has been shot and killed in the struggle. Peter pursues the killer to an abandoned warehouse and confronts him face to face — only to realize the killer is the very thief he had let escape from the wrestling promoter's office. The killer falls out a window during the struggle and dies.

Peter, devastated by the realization that he could have prevented his uncle's death, embraces a new principle Uncle Ben had told him just hours before his murder: with great power comes great responsibility. Peter graduates from high school. He moves to a tiny apartment in Manhattan with Harry Osborn (who is now dating Mary Jane to Peter's quiet anguish). He takes a job photographing for the Daily Bugle, whose editor J. Jonah Jameson loathes Spider-Man and pays Peter top dollar for any new shots. Peter, in costume, begins to develop a public persona. New York's tabloid press both adores and fears him. He saves a woman from a falling girder, recovers a baby from a burning building, and stops a hostage situation at the Bugle. He becomes the city's first masked street-level vigilante.

Norman Osborn, separately, has been transforming into the Green Goblin — a name his alter ego adopts after stealing his own company's prototype experimental flight suit and energy-bomb glider. The Goblin attacks the OsCorp board of directors during a public expo on the Manhattan skyline, killing them with a calorie-bomb explosion that vaporizes their bodies. Spider-Man arrives mid-attack and saves Mary Jane from a falling balcony. The Goblin, watching from his glider, recognizes Spider-Man's threat. He tries to recruit Spider-Man into a partnership, then attacks him outright when Peter refuses. Their first major fight, on an industrial rooftop, ends inconclusively. Peter is wounded. The Goblin, now more crazed than ever, begins targeting Peter directly through the people closest to him.

The Goblin attacks Aunt May at her bedside, leaving her in shock. He puts together that Spider-Man's affection for Mary Jane and his closeness to Aunt May indicate Peter Parker's identity. He delivers an ultimatum on the Queensboro Bridge: choose between saving Mary Jane (held over the river) or saving a tram-car full of children he has dropped onto the bridge cables. Spider-Man manages, in a sequence of impossible improvisation, to save both. The civilians and onlookers below — having watched a masked stranger save dozens of children with his own body — pelt the Goblin's glider with bricks and steel pipes when he tries to retreat. The crowd's protectiveness shocks the Goblin. He drags Spider-Man to an abandoned construction site for a final fight.

The final battle in the construction-site warehouse is brutal and personal. The Goblin removes his mask, revealing himself as Norman Osborn. He pleads with Peter — both as Spider-Man and as Harry's best friend — for forgiveness, claiming the Goblin persona is a separate split personality. Peter momentarily lowers his guard. The Goblin attempts to impale him with the remote-controlled glider blade. Peter dodges; the glider impales Norman instead. Norman dies in his costume, asking Peter not to tell Harry the truth. Peter agrees. He carries Norman's body home. Harry walks in to find Peter standing over his father's corpse and assumes Peter killed Norman. Their friendship cracks open.

At Norman's funeral, Mary Jane confesses her love for Peter for the first time. Peter — terrified of what loving him would expose her to — rejects her. He cannot bear the thought of the Goblin or his successors targeting her. He visits Uncle Ben's grave alone in the closing voiceover, recommitting himself to the great responsibility his powers demand. He swings into a Manhattan sunset across the city skyline. Spider-Man (2002) is the moment modern superhero cinema took the genre seriously and ran with it. Sam Raimi's combination of pulp horror sensibility (he'd previously made the Evil Dead trilogy), genuine soap-opera emotional weight, and the technical advances in computer graphics that finally allowed convincing wall-crawling, made the film an enormous commercial and cultural success. It grossed $821 million globally on a $139 million budget, broke the opening-weekend box-office record, and inspired the wave of comic-book adaptations that has dominated Hollywood for the two decades since.

Tobey Maguire's casting was reportedly contested by the studio; producers had wanted a more established star. Sam Raimi insisted on Maguire's vulnerable, reedy presence as the only register that would make Peter Parker feel like a real teenager rather than a square-jawed action figure. Willem Dafoe brought theatrical menace to the dual roles of Norman Osborn and the Green Goblin; the famous mirror-monologue scene where Norman talks to his own demonic alter ego in a foyer mirror has been studied in acting classes for decades. The film's score by Danny Elfman — particularly the rising heroic main theme — became as iconic as the character it accompanied. Spider-Man's commercial success directly enabled the modern Marvel film industry; without its $821 million box office, Sony would not have ordered the sequels that paid for the rights renegotiations that ultimately brought Tom Holland's Peter Parker into the Marvel Cinematic Universe two decades later.