Spider-Man: HomecomingSave

2012. Lower Manhattan. The dust hasn't settled from the Battle of New York. A blue-collar salvage crew led by Adrian Toomes — barrel-chested, bald, in a yellow construction hardhat — is hauling scrap metal and Chitauri alien tech off the streets of Queens under a city contract. They've been at it for two weeks. Toomes has eight men on payroll, three trucks, two daughters at home, and a mortgage. Then a black SUV pulls into his loading dock. A man in a suit gets out with a clipboard and an ID badge that reads DEPARTMENT OF DAMAGE CONTROL — a brand-new federal agency, jointly funded by Tony Stark and the U.S. government, that has been retroactively granted exclusive authority over all alien-technology cleanup in the city. Toomes's contract is voided on the spot. He's evicted from the site. He stands in the rubble holding a half-disassembled Chitauri energy core in his hand. He looks at it. He looks at his crew. "The rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want." He keeps the part. He keeps a truck. He goes underground.

Cut to 2016. Peter Parker — fifteen, skinny, glasses-free, in a slightly oversized blue zip-up hoodie — sits in the back of a black Audi being driven to the airport in Berlin. He's just spent thirty-six hours in Germany getting his ass handed to him by Captain America and saving Tony Stark from Bucky Barnes during the events of Civil War (2016). He's recording the whole experience on his iPhone in vlog style — running commentary on Happy Hogan, on the hotel room, on Mr. Stark's plane. Tony, in the airport corridor, hands him back his backpack. "Listen up, kid. If anything wacky happens — call me. Or, you know, call Happy." Peter goes home to a small two-bedroom walkup in Forest Hills, Queens. He stashes the new Stark-built Spider-Man suit in his closet next to the homemade red-and-blue costume his Aunt May still doesn't know exists. He waits for Tony to call.

Tony doesn't call. It's been two months. Peter is back at Midtown School of Science and Technology trying to make midterm grades and waiting for the bat-signal. His friend Ned Leeds — wide grin, wide curiosity, computer kid — knows nothing about the Spider-Man secret yet. The girl he has a crush on, Liz Allan, is the senior academic decathlon team's captain. Flash Thompson is the rich-kid bully on the same team. Peter, frustrated by being benched from the Avengers, starts patrolling Queens after school in the Stark suit and badly underperforming at the academic decathlon. He tries to stop muggings. He helps an old lady carry groceries. He fends off bike thieves. He's a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and he hates it.

Then he hears something. An ATM in Queens is being robbed by four men in alien-tech-tipped masks (Avengers Brock Rumlow style, but Toomes-cell built). They're armed with anti-gravity gauntlets that fire purple Chitauri energy pulses. Peter intervenes. The Chitauri-energy weapon turns out to be far more destructive than the muggers themselves know — one of them accidentally vaporizes the deli storefront across the street with a wild shot. Peter saves the deli owner Mr. Delmar (his favorite bodega, where he gets a sub every day) and gets away with one of the recovered weapons. He brings it home. Ned, sleeping over, finds it in Peter's backpack. "What is THAT?" Peter has to come out — "Ned, I'm Spider-Man." Ned: "You're not Spider-Man." Peter does a backflip in the bedroom. Ned: "YOU'RE SPIDER-MAN."

Peter and Ned spend a Saturday in his bedroom debugging the Stark suit's secret features. The suit has 576 different web combinations, a tracker drone the size of a thumb, multiple language translation, a heating element, instant kill mode (Peter disables), and a built-in AI Stark named Karen with a soothing female voice. Peter starts using it for serious patrol work. He tracks an arms-deal exchange between Toomes's crew and a buyer at a Queens automatic-car-wash. He follows them in the Stark suit. He nearly catches them — but Toomes himself, in a winged exo-suit made of Chitauri tech, swoops in and tears Peter apart in midair, dropping him into a Westchester County lake to drown. Tony Stark's remote-controlled Iron Man suit comes flying out of the sky and fishes Peter out at the last second. Then Tony's face appears live in the helmet. "What if somebody had died tonight? Would that be on your conscience?" Tony pulls Peter off active patrol and confiscates the high-tech suit. Peter goes back to the homemade red-and-blue costume.

Peter quits the academic decathlon to focus on Spidey work, then quits Spidey work after Tony shuts him down, then has nothing to do. So when Liz hosts a house party two weeks before the Homecoming dance, Peter and Ned go. He spots Toomes's crew making a tech sale near the Washington Memorial parking lot. He, Ned, and the decathlon team are en route to D.C. for the national finals. He sneaks out of the team hotel, climbs the Washington Monument fire escape in his homemade suit, and is in the middle of the Monument's elevator shaft when the Chitauri-tech weapon Ned is curiously holding back at the hotel detonates and traps every kid in the elevator at the top of the Monument. Peter scales the outside of the Monument at sunrise in his homemade suit and pries the elevator hatch open from the top. He saves the entire decathlon team. He never tells them it was him.

Back in Queens. Peter, still in his homemade suit, intercepts Toomes's next deal at the Staten Island Ferry. He web-shoots the dealers' anti-gravity weapon and the dealers' return fire ruptures the ferry's mid-section, splitting the ship in half across the harbor. Half the ferry starts sinking with three hundred passengers aboard. Peter desperately tries to web-net the two halves back together. He almost manages it — until Iron Man flies down out of the sky and seals the breach with a hot-weld nano-tech repair. Tony is furious. "I told you what would happen if you got involved. I asked you to be better than me — and you suit up anyway. If you're nothing without the suit, you shouldn't have it." Tony pulls the Stark suit off Peter completely. Peter walks home in his t-shirt and jeans.

Homecoming day. Peter is in a JCPenney rental tuxedo, picking Liz up at her house in Queens. He rings the doorbell. The door opens. Adrian Toomes — Liz's father, Peter's nemesis, Vulture himself — is standing in the foyer. Peter's blood goes cold. They smile at each other through dinner. Toomes drives Peter and Liz to the dance — Liz in the backseat, Peter in the passenger seat, Toomes at the wheel. Halfway to the school, Toomes puts the pieces together. "Brooklyn-bound spider-friend." "It's not what it looks like." "I'd kill you if I weren't worried I'd ruin Liz's whole night." He warns Peter to stay away from his daughter, stay out of his business, and let him pull off one last big score that night — a hijack of a Stark Industries 747 carrying the entire Avengers headquarters' weapon inventory from upstate New York to the new Avengers Compound. "You couldn't possibly understand what I do. People like Stark — they don't care about us. We have to look out for our own." He drops Peter and Liz at the dance.