The Amazing Spider-Man 2Save

The film opens in mid-air. Richard and Mary Parker — Peter's biological parents — are aboard a small private jet attempting to escape a hijacker. Richard transmits scientific research files via a hidden uplink before the hijacker breaks into the cabin and a struggle leaves both Parkers dead in the resulting crash. The flashback establishes that Richard had been working on cross-species genetic experiments at OsCorp under conditions that ultimately put a target on his entire family. Cut to the present day. Peter Parker, now in his final year of high school, is delivering valedictorian speeches and has reunited romantically with Gwen Stacy despite his promise to her dying father. He is haunted by Captain Stacy's posthumous warning, repeatedly hallucinating the older man's accusing presence in mirrors and crowds.

An OsCorp electrical engineer named Max Dillon is working alone late one night when an industrial accident drops him into a tank of genetically modified electric eels. The accident transforms his body into pure electrical energy. Max, who had been an obsessive Spider-Man fan after Peter saved his life weeks earlier, becomes confused, frightened, and increasingly resentful when Spider-Man fails to recognize him at a Times Square confrontation. The standoff escalates into a battle that demolishes much of the square. Max — now calling himself Electro — escapes into the city's electrical grid. He becomes a wanted man overnight. Meanwhile, Peter's old childhood best friend Harry Osborn returns to New York to take over OsCorp following the death of his terminally ill father Norman.

Norman Osborn, dying of a hereditary genetic condition called retroviral hyperplasia, leaves Harry the company and a private warning: the same hereditary disease that is killing Norman will manifest in Harry within months. Harry begins searching for a cure. He becomes obsessed with the OsCorp genetic-research files — particularly Richard Parker's work, which Norman had quietly archived. Harry deduces that Spider-Man's blood may contain the cross-species healing factor he needs to survive. He confronts Peter (whom he correctly suspects is Spider-Man, though Peter has not confirmed it) and asks for a blood transfusion. Peter, fearing the unknown effects of his transformed blood on a dying man, refuses.

Harry, betrayed by his oldest friend, fires the OsCorp board, takes operational control of the company, and is briefly arrested when he illegally accesses Norman's secret experimental subject vaults beneath the building. From his cell, Harry conspires with Electro: in exchange for the engineer's cooperation in destroying Manhattan's power grid and Spider-Man, Harry will personally inject Electro with experimental amplification serum from OsCorp's vault. Harry's own genetic disease accelerates rapidly. He breaks out of his cell, finds the prototype Goblin formula his father had developed for himself, and injects it. The serum cures the disease but transforms Harry into a hideous skeletal version of his old self with super-speed, super-strength, and access to the prototype Goblin glider hidden in his father's office.

Peter and Gwen Stacy, working together, locate Electro at a Manhattan power station where he is rapidly absorbing the city's grid. Their plan is to overload him by making him conduct more electricity than his body can hold. Peter battles Electro across the station's high-voltage relays while Gwen — a brilliant electrical-physics student — programs the substation to discharge a coordinated maximum power surge through Electro's body. The plan works. Electro, overwhelmed by his own power, explodes into harmless atoms. Peter and Gwen embrace amid the wreckage. The moment is interrupted by Harry — now the new Goblin — who arrives on his glider and immediately recognizes Gwen as Spider-Man's emotional weak point.

Harry kidnaps Gwen and takes her to the top of an abandoned clock tower at Oscorp's old research site. Peter pursues. The fight at the top of the tower is brief, brutal, and quietly devastating. Harry throws Gwen into the gear-shaft beneath the tower. Peter dives down the shaft to catch her. He shoots a web at the last possible second. The web reaches her. He stops her fall — but the web's snap pulls her body upward against the rapidly approaching shaft floor. Her head strikes the concrete. Peter pulls her up. She is dead in his arms. The film's most quietly devastating image is Peter cradling her body on the cold floor, refusing to let her go.

Peter retreats from Spider-Man. He spends months at her grave. He stops patrols. He stops responding to crime. The city watches a hero abdicate. New York deteriorates without him. The closing sequence is structured as a return to the cape: Peter watches a recording of Gwen's high-school graduation speech, in which she had spoken about hope and the importance of keeping going even when it hurts. He recommits. He returns to the streets just as a new villain — Aleksei Sytsevich in a mechanical Rhino battle suit — has begun rampaging through Manhattan with experimental military weapons sold to him by Oscorp's rogue security operations division. Peter swings into the heart of the chaos to confront the Rhino. The freeze-frame ending pauses the film as Spider-Man is mid-leap toward the new threat — leaving the closing shot deliberately incomplete.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 grossed $709 million globally — a number that, on a $200 million-plus production budget, was deemed underperforming by Sony Pictures. Critical reception was sharply divided. The film's emotional centerpiece — the death of Gwen Stacy — was widely praised as faithful to the famous comic-book storyline The Night Gwen Stacy Died (1973), and Andrew Garfield's grief-stricken closing reaction has been frequently cited as one of the genre's most heartbreaking moments. Less well received were the film's overstuffed villain roster (Electro, Goblin, Rhino), its heavy reliance on setup for spinoffs that never materialized, and Jamie Foxx's broadly comic performance as Max Dillon before his transformation. Sony scrapped Marc Webb's planned The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and 4 and immediately partnered with Marvel Studios for the MCU integration that produced Tom Holland's Spider-Man: Homecoming three years later. Andrew Garfield's redemptive return in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) gave his arc the closure this film denied it.

The film's most divisive choice was its heavy front-loading of cinematic universe setup. Sony had been planning a slate of Spider-Man-adjacent spinoffs centered on the Sinister Six and on a female-led ensemble film — both projects that the studio publicly announced and then quietly canceled in the wake of this film's reception. The web-slinger's mid-credits scene, briefly featuring an X-Men sequence as part of the Sony-Fox shared universe agreement of the period, ended up referencing a future that never quite materialized. Hans Zimmer composed the film's score with a specially assembled collective called The Magnificent Six (which included Pharrell Williams and Johnny Marr); the result was an unusual, divisive sonic palette built around Electro's electronic motifs. Despite the picture's mixed reception, Andrew Garfield's heartbreak in the final act remains one of the most quoted Spider-Man performances of any era.