Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

Hope everyone who celebrates had a great Christmas.  I didn't watch a single thing except this movie and the last two episodes of Hawkeye the entire week and a half I was gone.  I'm going to do my best to post a spoiler-free review.  

After having been outed as Spider-Man by Mysterio, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) finds himself the most famous person in the world.  Legally, he's covered, but public opinion is divided and it affects not just Peter's future but MJ's (Zendaya) and Ned's (Jacob Batalon) when the three of them are rejected from MIT.  In desperation, Peter turns to Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) for a spell that will make everyone forget that he is Spider-Man.  As you may have guessed, this is a terrible idea and immediately backfires, pulling everyone who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man from all across the multiverse.  

Okay, so this movie does a lot of things and does them well.  This is good and bad.  Good because who doesn't want a great Spider-Man movie that successfully combines fan service and new lore?  Bad because now everyone is going to want to try it, and very few are going to get it right.

If you've finished Hawkeye, this won't be a spoiler, but if you haven't, it might be so I'm going to put it in white and you can highlight it to see.  The Netflix MCU shows are canon now.  Daredevil is Peter's lawyer and I'm so fucking excited to see all of them show up in the next Avengers movie.  Honestly, if you've spent a lot of time online, you'll have seen the breathless speculation about this movie, so the three Spider-Men might even feel old hat, but theres'a huge difference between fans guessing wildly and actually seeing all of them on screen.  

I've never been that big a fan of Spider-Man as a character but this is a ridiculously fun movie that works even better when you allow it to just happen to you instead of aggressively predicting everything about it. There is a mid-credits sequence that ties in a Sony character, and then a post-credit which is basically just a trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.  

Sony and Disney are reluctant bedfellows here so don't expect to see this on Disney+ any time soon, if you're still hesitant about going to the theater (valid).  Sony has an agreement with Starz so it'll hit there first for streaming after the theatrical window closes.  Disney will pick up sloppy seconds after that.