Remember Peter Parker? By the end of the last instalment of the Spider-Man movies, No Way Home, we were the only ones who could. Following a characteristically complicated but deft collision of multiverses, young Peter (Tom Holland) had realised that the only way to save the world (again) was by getting Doctor Strange to cast a spell that made everybody – including his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) – forget that he’d ever been Spider-Man.

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He therefore began his Brand New Day alone in his apartment with only a highly evolved piece of AI for company. Sure, he’d returned to his roots of capturing local crooks by the dozen. But while this restored the hero status that J. Jonah Jameson had motivelessly tried to undermine in No Way Home, it failed to cure his loneliness. ‘Spider-Man has to do the hard thing,’ he mused, ‘even if it breaks Peter Parker’s heart.’

And for much of the film, this was the crisis he was facing. Having resolved to go all-in with being Spidey at the expense of Peter, he found his arachnoid........

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