Spider-Man fans are certainly used to epic trailers made for the webslinger, but the best of these can be found in the strangest of places.
Fans of Spider-Man are hardly strangers to getting treated to an epic trailer. With nine theatrical releases over the last 20 years, sometimes the release of a new trailer marketing an upcoming Spidey flick can be more exciting than the release of the film itself. Well, maybe not more exciting, but just as exciting. After all, it was the intense anticipation leading up to the release of the first trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home that led it to get 355 million views in its first 24 hours, a record that’s still yet to be beaten.
However, the best trailer made for Spider-Man was, in fact, not released to advertise an upcoming film. It was quietly uploaded to YouTube just before the digital release of No Way Home. And it barely runs over a minute long. Despite all the factors working against it, it is supremely well-cut and does something important that no other trailer for the web-slinger has accomplished. It is the trailer for the official Spider-Man YouTube channel.
There are many things this trailer gets right, and the most obvious is its choice of music. It uses the same track used for the main trailer of Spider-Man: No Way Home, composed by Black Hydra. It is an epic composition that fits Spider-Man’s tone perfectly, so it’s great to see it utilized to such great effect. Furthermore, this is a trailer that doesn’t waste any time and gets straight to the point. It’s a celebration of all things Spider-Man, and it means all things Spider-Man.
Before the conception and release of No Way Home, one of the things Sony struggled with in the Spider-Man franchise was how to deal with legacy aspects of the cinematic brand. It’s an understandable conundrum, as while Maguire and Garfield’s versions of the character were no longer the “current” versions, they were still respected incarnations with a vast army of fans behind each of them. Similarly, there was a fear that giving any time to past versions of the character would detract from Holland. Sony’s previous attitude was to simply keep the previous franchises distinctly separate, but then, No Way Home changed everything.
Spider-Man: No Way Home did the impossible; it managed to unite three completely separate film series under one roof. Previously, the Spider-Man films were reboot after reboot, moving on and discarding the previous versions. And now, thanks to No Way Home, it suddenly could become one big epic cinematic saga that ran for the last 20 years, one that could rival The Skywalker Saga. It would be easy to dismiss it and say it doesn’t count because this was never planned to be the case, just a happy accident. But one could argue the same for the Star Wars films.
That’s what the Spider-Man channel trailer is all about; it finally threads together and celebrates all the disparate corners of the Spider-Man mythos. There’s something magical about watching Tom Holland’s Spidey swinging through New York, then seamlessly cutting to Tobey swinging before cutting to Garfield. The trailer also epically cuts between individual shots of the Spider-Men leaping away in their own films before cutting to the iconic shot from No Way Home of the three landing together. But the truth is, for any Spider-Man fan, the best moment is hearing, “with great power, there must also come great responsibility,” as the trailer cuts between Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben, Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May, and Martin Sheen’s Uncle Ben. It’s very emotional and absolutely works. It may not be the biggest or most epic trailer made for Spider-Man. But despite that, the trailer for the official Spider-Man YouTube channel remains the best.
