Every Sony Marvel movie ranked from worst to best
By Wesley Bell
9. Spider-Man 3
The final film in the original Spider-Man trilogy is very much three different stories forced into one, and it suffers because of that.
The first and main plotline has Peter Parker come in contact with an alien symbiote following a date with Mary Jane, which changes his personality entirely, as he becomes more aggressive and hostile, eventually leading him and Mary Jane to break up. When he ultimately rids himself of the symbiote, it attaches itself to Eddie Brock, a rival photographer at the Daily Bugle whom he exposes for doctoring pictures of Spider-Man.
The second plot follows up on the reveal where Harry finally discovers that Peter is behind the mask and decides to get revenge for Norman by using his father’s tech to become the new Goblin.
The third and final plot sees Flint Marko, an escaped prisoner who Peter learns was partially responsible for his uncle’s death, get trapped in a particle accelerator that turns his body into grains of sand. After becoming Sandman, Marko begins committing crimes across the city to get money to care for his dying daughter, the most sympathetic motivation for a villain in the Raimi trilogy. His criminal activities put him at odds with Peter, who almost kills Marko due to the symbiote’s influence.
The finale does its best to merge all the plots by having Peter team up with Harry, who learns the truth about how his father died from his dad’s butler, to take down Venom and Sandman, who are working together and, unsurprisingly, kidnap Mary Jane to get his attention. The battle shows Harry stopping Sandman by using the bombs on his glider while Peter uses sonic attacks to kill Venom. Harry dies after the fight, finally forgiving Peter, and the film ends with a funeral, just like the first one did, before showing Peter and Mary Jane start to take steps to fix their relationship.
It does continue the will-they-won’t-they relationship between Peter and Mary Jane that remains the most uninteresting part of these movies, basically putting them back at square one despite Peter planning on asking Mary Jane to marry him early on and has the studio-mandated Venom plotline that, while enjoyable, does make the film feel bloated. Despite all that, Spider-Man 3 is not nearly as bad as many people make it out to be. It simply would have benefitted from being separate movies (each one focused on those three plotlines), especially since the planned fourth film that would have seen Spider-Man take on the Vulture never came to be.