The Amazing Spider-ManSave

The film opens with a young Peter Parker discovering his father's home office has been ransacked. Documents are scattered. His father Richard quickly packs Peter into a car with his mother Mary, drives him to his Aunt May and Uncle Ben's house in Queens, and disappears into the night with his wife. Peter never sees his parents again. They die in a plane crash months later. Cut to a teenage Peter, now living with Aunt May and Uncle Ben in a modest Queens home. He is socially awkward and skateboard-obsessed. He attends Midtown Science High School. He is bullied by Flash Thompson and quietly fascinated by Gwen Stacy, the brilliant and confident daughter of NYPD Captain George Stacy. Peter discovers his late father's old briefcase in the basement, containing photographs of Richard with another scientist named Dr. Curt Connors and a notebook of cryptic genetic equations.

Peter, looking for clues about his father's research, sneaks into OsCorp Industries by impersonating an intern named Rodrigo Guevara. He attends a tour of the genetic-engineering laboratory, where he wanders into a restricted area to find Curt Connors's department. The lab contains a colony of genetically modified spiders engineered as part of a cross-species genetic study. One of them bites Peter on the neck. By morning, Peter has the now-familiar abilities: enhanced strength, agility, wall-crawling, precognitive spider-sense. He develops mechanical web-shooters at home using OsCorp's research as a starting point — synthesizing his own webfluid in his bedroom and building wrist-mounted dispensers.

Peter approaches Dr. Connors directly, presenting himself as Richard Parker's son and bringing his father's research notes. Connors is stunned. He had been working with Richard Parker on cross-species genetic regeneration before Richard disappeared — research aimed at regrowing lost limbs. Connors lost his right arm years earlier to a wartime injury. Richard's notes contain the missing equation that allows the regeneration formula to function safely. Connors uses the formula to inject himself with reptilian DNA, hoping to regrow his arm. The arm grows back, but the formula's instability causes him to mutate further into the Lizard — a hulking, scaled, eight-foot-tall creature with violent reptilian instincts.

On a separate track, Peter's relationships unfold. He pursues Gwen Stacy with quiet, clumsy persistence. She agrees to dinner at her family's apartment, where Peter meets Captain Stacy — a stern career cop who has been publicly hunting Spider-Man for vigilantism. Aunt May worries about Peter's increasingly erratic schedule and his decision to lie to her about where he goes at night. The pivotal personal tragedy strikes when Peter, exhausted from a Spider-Man patrol, gets into an argument with Uncle Ben at home over Peter's irresponsibility and storms out. Ben goes looking for him at a corner store. A robber confronts the clerk; Ben tries to stop him. The robber shoots Ben dead and escapes. Peter, arriving at the scene moments later, learns of his uncle's death and dedicates himself to hunting the killer.

Spider-Man begins systematically interrogating petty criminals across Queens looking for the killer. The Lizard, meanwhile, has begun experimenting on the entire OsCorp research staff. He plans to release a cross-species genetic mist over Manhattan to transform the city's entire human population into reptilian-hybrid creatures, believing reptiles to be evolutionarily superior. Peter and the Lizard cross paths repeatedly across the city. In one sequence, Peter battles the Lizard in his own school's hallways while attempting to keep students safe. In another, the Lizard rampages through a sewer tunnel system. Captain Stacy initially sees Spider-Man as a vigilante threat, but his investigation gradually reveals the deeper truth: the Lizard has been killing OsCorp researchers, and Spider-Man has been protecting them.

Gwen Stacy, who interns at OsCorp, helps Peter prepare an antidote to the Lizard's genetic mist. The serum must be released into the OsCorp tower's emission system at the moment the Lizard's mist is launched, or both will be ineffective. Peter battles the Lizard up the OsCorp tower while construction-crane operators across the city tilt their cranes toward the building, creating an uninterrupted aerial path Peter can swing along — a sequence inspired by an earlier scene in which Peter saves a construction worker's son from a falling car. Peter reaches the tower's emitter and successfully replaces the genetic mist with the antidote. The Lizard reverts to Curt Connors, restored to his original physical and mental state.

Captain Stacy has fought the Lizard alongside Peter on the rooftop and is mortally wounded in the battle. Dying, Stacy makes Peter promise to stay away from his daughter — to keep Gwen safe from the inevitable cost of being close to a man hunted by a city's worst criminals. Peter, traumatized and grieving, breaks his rooftop promise immediately the next day, telling Gwen they cannot be together. The film closes on Peter walking back into Midtown Science High School, his English teacher reciting a poem about love, and Peter looking across the room at Gwen — who looks back. The closing voiceover sets up the inevitability of their continued relationship despite his promise.

The Amazing Spider-Man grossed $757 million globally on a $230 million budget. Marc Webb, primarily known for the romantic-comedy 500 Days of Summer, was an unexpected directorial choice for a superhero blockbuster. The film's chemistry between Andrew Garfield's Peter and Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy was widely praised; the two were dating in real life during production, and their on-screen romance carries a genuine warmth that was widely considered the strongest element of the picture. The film's mid-credits scene featured a mysterious figure in shadow visiting Connors in his cell, hinting at larger cosmic-conspiracy plot threads that would never quite resolve. The franchise's planned third installment was scrapped after the disappointing reception of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014, leading directly to Sony's partnership with Marvel Studios that brought Tom Holland's Peter Parker to the MCU.

Andrew Garfield, then 28, was almost a decade older than Tobey Maguire had been when first cast, and the studio styled him as a more rebellious, skater-kid Peter than Maguire's bookish prototype. The film's rejection of organic web-shooters in favor of mechanical wrist-mounted devices was a deliberate return to the comic-book canon — a small but significant correction to Raimi's 2002 choice that fans of the source material had long wanted. Andrew Garfield's three-film arc was cut short by the franchise reboot, but the actor's beloved performance found its full closure nine years later in Spider-Man: No Way Home, where Garfield's Peter is given the chance to save MJ from a fall — a quiet rewriting of the Gwen Stacy tragedy that defined his second film. The cathartic power of that moment is one of the great gifts the multiverse-cinema era has given to long-running comic-book characters.