If you include his archival appearance in the post-credits scene of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, then next week’s Spider-Man: No Way Home will mark Tom Holland’s seventh outing as the iconic superhero in just five and a half years.
He’s headlined a solo trilogy and lent support in Marvel Cinematic Universe crossovers Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, with plenty more web-slinging content coming down the pipeline. The danger of over-saturation is very real, though, especially when Holland’s tenure under the spandex has averaged more than one outing per year.
Speaking to Comic Book Movie, the actor admitted that maybe audiences need to take a break from Spider-Man for at least a little while, to avoid both Holland and the fans getting burned out from seeing him so often.
“I think, for me, as the guy that plays Spider-Man – so you could say that I know him the best – I think what’s important is that he needs to take a break. We need to allow the audiences to let him breathe and figure out tonally how we’re going to bring this character back, if we bring this character back… I think what we need to do with Spider-Man is let it breathe and almost let the audience tell us what they want.”
Of course, Sony might have other ideas when the studio rebranded its entire shared mythology as Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, with plans for another Holland trilogy already afoot on top of Morbius, Kraven the Hunter, Venom 3 and whatever else is being cooked up behind the scenes.
Ever since his debut in 2016, the pandemic-riddled events of 2020 has been the only calendar year where we haven’t seen Holland’s Spider-Man at least once, something that may be about to change.