How Spider-Man: No Way Home Breaks A Superhero Movie Villains Curse

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On top of breaking box-office records, Spider-Man: No Way Home has also broken a well-known superhero movie curse. The third chapter of MCU’s Spider-Man saga opened the doors to the multiverse in an epic story that will forever have an impact on Peter Parker’s life. After months of anticipation, No Way Home delivered on expectations and proves that MCU’s Multiverse plan is full of potential. By bringing back villains from every previously Spider-Man franchise, No Way Home had an enormous creative challenge to surpass, and yet the movie succeeded where a lot of superhero movies failed.

 

For years, any superhero film featuring more than two villains was always expected to fail. The “three villains curse” is often pointed to as one of the biggest flaws in many productions and has become almost a rule when trying to predict the quality of an upcoming superhero movie. For Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, trying to combine the stories of the New Goblin, Sandman, and Venom was one of the reasons why the third entry in the series was not as good as the first two. Similarly, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had two villains’ storylines while also trying to set up Rhino and the Sinister Six. The X-Men films also did not escape from that problem in X-Men: The Last Stand (Magneto, Jean, and the cure’s storyline) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Saber-tooth, Striker, and Deadpool).

 

Spider-Man: No Way Home finally breaks that curse by having five villains placed on a cohesive story that has culminated in a successful film. After fighting Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was now placed against five multiversal villains all at once. Going by the mentioned tradition, No Way Home had everything to be a disaster in terms of pacing and storytelling. However, the movie’s great reception both by critics and the audiences showed that having too many villains was never the problem.

 

The real struggle faced by superhero films, no matter how many villains were in it, was how to converge the antagonists’ journeys into a single storyline that served the themes of the movie and elevated the main character. Having only one main story in which each of the villains was placed is how No Way Home avoids the real issue behind the other films’ failures. Despite having different arcs and different levels of importance throughout the movie, all the villains in No Way Home were there to contribute to Peter Parker’s growth by making him face the same challenges that others Peter Parkers had encountered.

 

Spider-Man: No Way Home is already a landmark not only in Spider-Man films but also in superhero production as a whole, and finding a way to break the “too many villains” curse is one of the reasons for it. No Way Home’s outstanding financial success can serve as a lesson for future superhero movies that the number of villains is not directly related to how good or bad the production will be. Instead, the quality of the story, and how each character can contribute to it, is what the film must truly focus on.

 

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