In a driveway back in 2002, Uncle Ben delivers a line — and every Spider-Man film released since has been quietly attempting to recreate it.
Not one of them has pulled it off.
No superhero on the planet is bigger than Spider-Man, Marvel or otherwise, and between the comics, the live-action films, the animated features and everything else, he has accumulated no shortage of dialogue fans can rattle off from memory. Yet a single line still towers over the rest.
Tom Holland’s run is headed toward being the character’s largest franchise to date. Judged purely on box office receipts, it already holds that title.
Three franchises, one line everybody remembers
Look at Spider-Man’s live-action history and there’s a solid argument that no Marvel hero has a stronger record when it comes to movie franchises. Feel free to resent Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 3. Resent Andrew Garfield’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 even more, if you like. That’s fair. Even so, the two live-action franchises that came before the MCU movie timeline brought in Holland’s Peter Parker landed on the right side of the ledger.
Animation is its own story, and the Spider-Verse films pull off something no one else was attempting. Miles Morales sits at the center while the screen fills with Spider-Men and Spider-Women drawn from across the multiverse.
Add those 24 years together and the result is a mountain of quotes — emotional, inspirational, devastating, funny, and sometimes every one of those at once. A good number of them aren’t even spoken by Peter.
That’s what sets this franchise apart. It’s packed with beloved characters played by actors who understand exactly how to deliver a strong line. Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben. Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy. Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. Stan Lee in person. Every one of them has added something, right alongside the various Spider-Men.
The line your brain goes to first
Put the question of the greatest Spider-Man movie quote to any fan and time how quickly they answer. It’s Robertson, in Maguire’s debut outing, facing Peter and passing along the motto he would spend the rest of his life first failing and eventually managing to live by.
“Just because you can beat him up doesn’t give you the right to. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility,” Uncle Ben said in the 2002 film.
No quote across Spider-Man media is more iconic, and the reason it endures is that it isn’t a slogan at all. It’s a rebuke. Ben is instructing a teenager to back off.
It wasn’t even Uncle Ben’s line
Now for the detail plenty of people have let slip, or never picked up in the first place. In the comics, the quote was never originally credited to Uncle Ben.
It surfaced first as a Stan Lee narrative caption closing out Amazing Fantasy #15 — the issue that served as Spider-Man’s debut and recounted both how he gained his powers and how Uncle Ben died. It took many years before the words were reassigned to Peter Parker’s father figure.
The 2002 film cemented that handover so thoroughly that the original version hardly registers now. Spider-Man exists to protect people, and forgetting that is never an option.
Every sequel keeps trying to rewrite it
Warning: this section contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Ever since Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man, subsequent films featuring the character have kept taking their own shot at the line. The MCU entries gave it to Tomei’s Aunt May, a logical choice considering Uncle Ben has no meaningful presence in the shared universe. It worked, too, since she delivers her rendition moments before dying of wounds inflicted by Dafoe’s Green Goblin — the antagonist of Maguire’s first Spider-Man film.
“With great power, there must also come great responsibility,” she says in No Way Home.
Brand New Day then returns to that same well through a flashback that lands heavily for Peter. The scene takes place immediately after Aunt May learned he was Spider-Man in 2017’s Homecoming, and it’s the push that finally convinces Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey to give up her quest for revenge and embrace being a hero.
Once again it’s Tomei’s Aunt May, with yet another take on the line.
“That’s your deepest responsibility. Never forget that, no matter how powerful you become,” she says.
Three films, three attempts, and a single 2002 driveway that no one has managed to beat.