The Spider-Man Film Series

Hollywood loves a successful film series. The success of one film should in theory help to build the next one. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a great example. It’s the best of the Tom Holland era Spider-Man films and the most successful. It didn’t hurt that Tom Holland and Zendaya are the social media equivalent of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Spider-Man is an IP franchise that’s been managed as a film series. The film series features an actor who becomes synonymous with the Spider-Man character. This works in a similar way to the James Bond films.

Some film series are associated with one actor. Harrison Ford was Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981). Jennifer Lawrence was Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (2012). Sigourney Weaver was Elen Ripley in Alien (1979). Keanu Reeves was Neo in The Matrix (1999). Clint Eastwood was Dirty Harry in Dirty Harry (1971). Unlike these, the James Bond film series has featured multiple actors. Sean Connery started the series with Dr. No (1962). Daniel Craig was the last Bond. He first appeared as Bond in Casino Royale (2006).

A key difference between the Spider-Man and Bond film series is that the Spider-Man character has essentially remained the same, whereas the Bond character has shifted more. This was noticeable with the tonal switch from Sean Connery to Roger Moore (which exaggerated the humour) and, more recently, with the Daniel Craig era Bond, which broke a key ingredient of the screen Bond character… his invulnerability.

Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man (2002) was essentially Paul Hood, the character he played in The Ice Storm (2002). He was a youthful, round-faced, comic-reading kid, finding his way in the world. His boyish portrayal of Spider-Man had an emotional core. It had a classic coming-of-age sensitivity and vulnerability that set the tone for the Spider-Man film series. This contrasted Peter Parker with other superheroes, like Batman, with their chiselled adult muscularity.

Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man was more confident, with a sarcastic wit. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man feels lovably goofy, with a high-tech Spy Kids (2001) vibe. While the actors bring something of themselves (or what they’re known for) to the role, the Spider-Man character stays the same.

The Spider-Man film series is an old fashioned coming-of-age story. A romantic first love tale. It is also a special effects action adventure with a sense of humour. Having a screen-friendly face, like Tom Holland in the role of Peter Parker, goes a long way to make the magic work – but it’s also about the writers, being true to the promise of who Peter Parker is, and not breaking that promise with the audience.

The End of Oak Street

The problem with big reveals is that the success of the story hinges on one surprise. If it works, like The Matrix (1999), it’s rewarding. If it doesn’t work, the twist feels like a gimmick.

The End of Oak Street was marketed with a trailer that hints at a big revelation, but the surprise isn’t the science fiction plot. So, this isn’t a ‘big reveal story’, like The Matrix (1999) or The Island (2005). This is a straightforward ordinary family survives a challenging science fiction nightmare.

Director David Robert Mitchell has given us some excellent films: The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), a charming coming-of-age indie-style film, It Follows (2014) a cracking low budget horror, and Under the Silver Lake (2018) a quirky and off-beat homage to Film Noir. The End of Oak Street could have gone in a different direction. It could have been something more like Leave the World Behind (2023), an ‘Independent movie’ style production, which relies on atmosphere and the power of suggestion. Instead, it’s gone in a more mainstream ‘Hollywood summer blockbuster’ direction, like Jurassic Park (1993). As a result, the charm of his earlier films has given way to special effects and action sequences. This film is a homage to 1980s style sc-fi movies featuring an ordinary family thrust into a challenging situation. Typically, the arguing kids and parents learn to work together and harmony is restored. The End of Oak Street has remixed that with some bad poop jokes and an incongruous girlboss vibe, and without the harmonising resolution.

The power of storytelling comes from entertaining and delighting the audience by reinforcing or contradicting their expectations. The girlboss of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) can implausibly fight men twice her size. A skinny teenager can become a superhero with incredible powers… Spider-Man. The problem with The End of Oak Street is that it opts for a surprise character switch. In order to conceal the surprise the true nature of the characters cannot be foreshadowed properly.

As a result, the father is set up as the classic ‘nobody’ who transforms into a hero… but it turns out that he’s just a pathetic loser. While the mother takes on the unlikely girlboss role. Because the switch is supposed to be a surprise, it can’t be signalled to the audience in advance. The issue with these kinds of revelations is that the entire script has to make sacrifices for them to work. The costs can outweigh the benefits. The father’s role is set up only to be subverted later on, breaking the story promise. The story promise is that when the audience invests time in a character it shouldn’t feel pointless. There should be some kind of payoff later on. Without that, the audience will leave feeling disappointed. A similar thing happened in Blade Runner 2049 where the audience spent almost the entire film rooting for a character (who they thought would be the hero), only to be surprised by the revelation that he was a loser, a cog in someone else’s story. Emotionally investing in that character felt humiliating, like a bad bet.

There’s another revelation (in the style of 2013’s Oblivion) at the end of The End of Oak Street. This feels like an attempt to remedy the broken story promise. It isn’t given emotional significance and comes too late in the story. The end result lacks cohesion and concludes without a sense of balance having been restored to the story world.

Fussy Formatting?

Publishers package a manuscript into a product – something to attract readers’ attention. The cover, the testimonials, and the blurb on the back epitomise the process. Apart from the power of storytelling itself, once the book has been purchased, it’s the feel of the physical book – the feel of the paper, the quality of the printing, the typesetting and formatting of the text that affects the reading experience.

Prior to ebooks, the print quality of physical books seemed to be in decline. Quality, it appeared, had been increasingly sacrificed for cost savings. The typesetting often squeezed the text (using smaller fonts, smaller line heights, narrow margins, and less space at the start of new chapters) to reduce the overall cost. The tactile quality of physical books had declined, along with the reading experience.

The arrival of ebooks gave readers new options. The ability to change the text size and choose a font. Physical books lost market share. Since then, publishers have reconsidered the physical book as an object. The paper quality has improved. The printing has sharpened. Novels, I would argue, are formatted with more consideration for a great reading experience (the kind previously associated with premium hardbacks).

The typesetting – the formatting of the text – is another critical part of the reading experience. This means a standardised and consistent approach that lets the reader get through the story with the least amount of confusion or distraction.

In the UK we generally use single quotes for dialogue:

‘The fox jumps over the lazy dog,’ he said.

It does a good job of indicating clearly where the dialogue is without being too intrusive. The US uses double quotation marks, which do look slightly more cluttered:

“The fox jumps over the lazy dog,” he said.

French has the guillemet (« ») for standard use and the em-dash for novels:

— The fox jumps over the lazy dog, he said.

There are many different variations of dialogue quotes. German has low-high double quotes („ “) or the inward pointing guillemet (» «). Japanese and Mandarin have corner brackets (「 」 and 『 』). The problem comes when there’s nothing to identify the dialogue:

The fox jumps over the lazy dog, he said.

This originates from Modernist writers like James Joyce, which in turn influenced writers like Cormac McCarthy. The trend continues with contemporary writers like Sally Rooney and Tim Winton. Cormac McCarthy also removed chapter titles and chapter numbering. Indicating dialogue helps the reader. Distinctive chapters provide useful way finders through a novel, which makes the text more accessible.

The rise of the internet and ‘business formatting’ has seen an increase in spaces between paragraphs. In a novel, a space between paragraphs has a functional purpose. It indicates a change of scene (a change in time or location). Having a gap between every paragraph looks weird in a novel, but it’s normal in digital content. This originates from a time when formatting text was difficult for screen content. Also, screens offered a much lower viewing quality than print. Peter Heller’s novel The Dog Stars is a great read, but why does it have a gap between every paragraph, like it’s been formatted in Microsoft Word?

The formatting and layout of the text in a novel is not a fussy detail – it makes the text more accessible.

The American Hero

The classical hero fights monsters and restores balance to the world. The modern version of the classical hero is the idealised protagonist who sacrifices their safety to fight the bad guys (the modern equivalent of monsters). The bad guys – criminals, gangsters, thieves, murderers, terrorists – use violence to gain money and power. Their actions create suffering and injustice. The idealised protagonist is motivated by a sense of duty and moral obligation to protect the innocent from the guilty.

America is a ‘can do’ society. It’s a place where people admire those with the ability to shape the world around them. The American hero reflects that ‘can do’ attitude, the ‘pioneer spirit’, and notions of the ‘rugged individual’. By the start of the Twentieth Century the myth-making of the Old American West merged with the European influence of folk heroes like Robin Hood and stage / literary heroes like The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). This synthesis led to the creation of American heroes that featured in pulp magazines, newspaper comic strips, radio plays, theatrical serials, and movies.

The masked aristocratic vigilante, Zorro (a product of the Spanish Empire and the inspiration behind Batman) first appeared in The Curse of Capistrano (1919), in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly. Tarzan, the son of British aristocrats, first appeared in the story Tarzan of the Apes (1912). The interplanetary adventurer John Carter, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a ‘home grown’ American hero. He first appeared in the pulp magazine series Under the Moons of Mars (1912).

The popularity of theatrical serials peaked in the 1930s. The serials included updated versions of John Carter – the space adventurers Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers (both originated from newspaper comic strips). The theatrical serials offered excitement and escapism for the masses. While aristocratic heroes felt ‘old world’, the science fiction of space could feel both new and ‘American’. The theatrical serial, The Phantom Empire (1935), combined the Western with Science Fiction. It featured singing cowboys, a fedora wearing robot, and a futuristic underground city.

The upbeat tone of the 1920s, the Jazz Age, changed with The Great Depression of the 1930s. The 1930s gangster movies created another uniquely American story after the Western. These movies portrayed an America of idealised protagonist cops fighting flawed gangster baddies. The violence echoed the real world. The gun-toting gangster terrified and fascinated audiences.

During the 1940s and the Second World War, the American hero was duty bound to fight for the nation. Marines and cowboys restored law and order to the world. In parallel, the cartoon-like simplicity of the gangster movie was replaced by Film Noir whose protagonists reflected the cynical atmosphere, but with more nuanced characters. These flawed individuals were ordinary people. They were often victims of crime and social manipulation, male characters tricked by femme fatales.

The 1950s saw a continuation of patriotic War Movies, Westerns, escapist musicals, and comedies. For many viewers, these increasingly felt increasing commercial and detached from reality. The men who had returned from the war were not cardboard cutout heroes and their children often grew up feeling alienated and angry. The origins of the counterculture began with the post-war Beat Generation and 1950s Beatniks.

In the 1960s and 70s, the counterculture went mainstream. It questioned assumptions about American society. Counterculture stories featured flawed protagonists, often labelled ‘anti-heroes’. Instead of actively changing the world about them, these flawed protagonists were more likely to be victims of circumstance and unable to escape their own limitations. In films like The Graduate (1967) this was used for comic effect and to make a wider social comment about society. Benjamin Braddock did eventually manage to change his world, so he wasn’t completely passive. In cop movies, like Serpico (1973), Frank Serpico had to deal with systemic corruption. A cultural switch took place in the slowly dying Western genre. Revisionist Westerns portrayed the once heroic cowboy as the aggressor and Native American Indians as innocent victims.

After the oil shortages and the economic shocks of the 1970s, the American hero learned to be a survivor. The cops became tougher, coping with a rotten bureaucratic system that didn’t care about truth or justice. Inspector Harry Callahan, in Dirty Harry (1971), fought serial killers while being held back by ‘the system’. The American hero became a survivor of the Cold War in films like the Omega Man (1973), living in a post-apocalyptic city and fending off mutants. There was the disaster movie, films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972 film) and The Towering Inferno (1974) where the coolheaded hero had the skills to lead and survive. By the end of the 1970s, the economy began to pick up. The audience wanted something upbeat and optimistic, and they found it with Star Wars (1977). But there was still a lingering distrust of the system in films like Alien (1979).

In the 1980s, the stock market boomed and the nation regained its confidence. Hollywood responded with the comic big action hero. This new breed of wisecracking American hero thrilled audiences and made them laugh in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Back to the Future (1985), and Crocodile Dundee (1986). There were buddy moves like Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Lethal Weapon (1987). There were situational comedies like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) and Twins (1988).

The economic downturn of the 1990s made people question the system again. The screen heroes reflected a mood of uncertainty. The disaster movie returned with Titanic (1997), Jurassic Park (1993), and Apollo 13 (1995). There were technological dystopias like Strange Days (1995) and The Matrix (1999) which questioned the nature of reality. The tone continued to darken with films like The Sixth Sense‍ (1999) and American Beauty (1999). David Fincher’s Seven (1995) personified the 90s with two protagonists who faced insurmountable horrors and were never fully in control.

The 2000s saw the rise of the big IP franchise in films like Avatar (2009), a revisionist Western in space, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2006), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). The Dark Knight (2008) took the darkness and realism of Seven and combined it with a classic comic strip hero. The superhero origin story became a template for the massive superhero revival.

The big IP franchises of the 2000s would go on to power the 2010s along with comic strip superheroes. There were reboots of classic movies, like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Mad Max. They increasingly featured a girlboss lead in films like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Spider-Man was rebooted in 2002. While not especially American, James Bond was rebooted in Casino Royale (2006).

In the 2020s, Top Gun: Maverick (2022) reassured audiences with a traditional male American hero. But this was challenged with continued gender swaps in girlboss films like Mad Max: Furiosa (2024) and diverse casting, like the black superhero film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). Several big IP franchises have reached natural end points. Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) felt like more of the same. Mission Impossible ended with Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025). And, for context, James Bond came to an end with No Time to Die (2021). Has the superhero genre peaked, or will its winning streak continue? The box-office success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) has shown that the big IP franchise superhero movie is not yet dead.

Hokum

With a relatively small budget of $5 million, the film succeeds in not looking like a budget production.

I was expecting Hokum to be a straightforward night in a haunted house kind of story, but there’s more to it than that. As a horror film, it delivers on those creepy moments and jump shocks. But, it’s also a ‘psychological story’ – a protagonist coming to terms with a childhood trauma.

The ‘psychological story’ is one where objective reality blurs with a subjective experience, fear and paranoia. What is real and what’s in the protagonist’s mind? Sometimes, the truth is revealed. In other stories, the blur of uncertainly is never resolved.

The danger of a big reveal is that it can be a big disappointment. On the other hand, leaving it open and uncertain can feel ‘lazy’ and non-committal. If the writer can’t be bothered to resolve the story properly – why should we care?

Stories are about change. The protagonist must change in order to make the story satisfying. Without that shift, the resolution is less likely to grab us. It’s more likely to leave us unsatisfied. Hokum’s psychological focus keeps us guessing, but it comes at a price. What it gains in nuance it loses in the certainty that Ohm Bauman has convincingly changed.

The End of Everything

The End of Everything (2026) is a literary science fiction novel by M John Harrison. It’s been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

In the story, Phillip Tennent lives by the sea in an impoverished future Britain. Communication with mainland Europe has broken down. New life forms exist in the sea. He ekes out a living by scavenging washed up objects and strange lifeforms from the sea shore.

The novel is a post-Brexit story, much like The Wall (2019) by John Lanchester, and Doggerland (2020) by Ben Smith. These three novels involve the sea, an isolated Britain, and a post-apocalyptic future.

The End of Everything is a work of literary science fiction. Where genre science fiction demands logical rules and a payoff with an explanation, literary science fiction keeps the world building relatively vague, focusing instead on the language and experience of the characters within that world.

In The End of Everything the narrative inhabits a dreamlike state. Part magical realism, part surreal metaphor. The lack of specificity enhances its mystery. It allows the story to operate as a cypher, a metaphor that’s open to interpretation. The world of the story operates in what feels like a surreal purgatory, a twilight world with sea dwelling lifeforms that have undergone a magical transformation, a rebirth even.