Spider-Man is the most beloved superhero in American popular culture, and that is not a matter of box office receipts or merchandising revenue. It is a matter of architecture. Peter Parker was designed by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962 to be the anti-sidekick: a teenage hero who was not a protege, not a ward, not a junior partner, but a fully independent protagonist carrying the weight of adult responsibility on adolescent shoulders. The power-and-responsibility formulation is not just a catchphrase. It is the moral spine of the character, and it has survived sixty years of continuity reboots, creative teams, and corporate acquisitions because it is a fundamentally conservative insight dressed in red and blue spandex.
That is what makes ranking Spider-Man films by ideological content so revealing. The same character who stands for personal responsibility, self-sacrifice, and the protection of the innocent has been adapted across eight live-action films and two animated features by Sony Pictures, a studio with no larger creative vision beyond extracting maximum value from its most valuable IP. The result is a filmography that ranges from the unapologetic traditionalism of No Way Home to the intersectional maximalism of Madame Web. The distance between the top and bottom of this list is smaller than the DC gap between Man of Steel and Birds of Prey, but it is real, and it tells a story about what happens when a fundamentally traditional character is handed to a fundamentally progressive industry.
VirtueVigil has now reviewed every significant Spider-Man and Sony Spider-Verse theatrical release using the VVWS dual-scoring system. The methodology is identical to every other review on the site: traditional values content (sacrifice, duty, family, faith, patriotism, earned heroism) and progressive ideological content (identity politics, systemic grievance, deconstruction of traditional institutions, subversion of established roles) are measured independently on separate 0-50 scales. The margin between them determines the verdict. These are not quality scores. A film can score high on traditional values and be poorly made. A film can score high on woke content and be technically brilliant. The score reflects what a film believes, not whether it is good.
Below, all ten Spider-Man and Sony Spider-Verse films reviewed by VirtueVigil, ranked from most traditional to most woke. Each entry links to the full VirtueVigil review with complete category breakdowns. This is the 2026 edition, updated through Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Spider-Man: Web of Heroes. Ten films. One hero. One ideological spectrum.
TRADITIONAL
#1. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
No Way Home is the most traditionally scored Spider-Man film in the VirtueVigil database and it earns that position through a narrative choice that could have been a cheap nostalgia play but instead became the moral center of the entire Holland trilogy. Peter Parker's decision to try to cure the multiverse villains rather than send them home to die is not softhearted naivete. It is a conscious moral choice that costs him everything: his identity, his relationships, his entire support structure. He gives up his life to save people who have tried to kill him, and the film treats that sacrifice with total sincerity. At 22.05 traditional, No Way Home has the highest raw trad score of any Spider-Man film. The 3.5 woke score is remarkably low for a 2021 blockbuster with a diverse cast. The film has no time for identity politics or systemic grievance. Its preoccupation is the oldest and most conservative question in the genre: what are you willing to lose to do the right thing?
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: No Way Home
#2. Spider-Man: Web of Heroes (2026)
Web of Heroes continues Jon Watts' run as the most ideologically consistent director in the Spider-Man franchise. The traditional score of 21.4 is driven by a narrative that places heroism as a collective responsibility while never abandoning the individual moral agent at the center. The film brings back Michael Keaton's Vulture and Riz Ahmed's Riot in what could have been a lazy callback but instead becomes a meditation on second chances and earned redemption. The 6.8 woke score reflects the diverse ensemble and a few contemporary beats in the dialogue, but the governing sensibility remains traditional: choices have consequences, sacrifice is noble, and the people you protect matter more than the ideology you signal.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: Web of Heroes
#3. Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
The Venom trilogy wraps up with its most traditionally weighted entry, and the reason is simple: the Eddie-Venom relationship has evolved into something that resembles a marriage, complete with bickering, loyalty, and mutual sacrifice. The 17.07 traditional score is driven by a finale that is genuinely affecting in its earnestness: Venom makes a choice to protect Eddie that costs him everything, and the film plays it straight. The 3.5 woke score is the lowest of any Spider-Verse film, tied with No Way Home. There is no messaging, no lecture, no identity politics. Just a man and his alien parasite learning that love means choosing the other person over yourself. It is the most ideologically surprising film in the entire Spider-Verse, and it earns its +14 margin honestly.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Venom: The Last Dance
#4. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Far From Home is the most underrated film in the Holland trilogy and the one that works hardest to earn its traditional score. Peter Parker's arc is about the burden of legacy: Tony Stark is dead, the world is looking for the next Iron Man, and Peter just wants to be a teenager on a field trip. The film's moral architecture is a response to that tension. Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio is a villain built entirely from the language of manipulated perception: he uses illusion and media manipulation to construct a false heroism, and Peter must learn to see through the performance to the truth. The 17.99 traditional score comes from Peter's ultimate rejection of shortcut heroism and his acceptance that the suit does not make the man. The 7.4 woke score reflects the diverse supporting cast and some contemporary banter, but the film's governing conviction is unmistakably conservative: truth over image, substance over spectacle.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: Far From Home
TRADITIONAL LEAN
#5. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Homecoming is the film that launched the MCU Spider-Man and established the template that Watts would refine across three films. The traditional content at 13.02 is driven by the core character arc: Peter desperately wants to be an Avenger, Tony Stark insists he needs to learn to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man first, and the lesson Peter ultimately internalizes is that heroism is about the small, unglamorous acts of protection, not the glory. Michael Keaton's Vulture is one of the best MCU villains precisely because he is not an ideologue. He is a working-class man who got screwed by the system and decided to look out for his own. The film refuses to endorse his actions while understanding his motivations, a moral complexity that reads as ideologically conservative: wrong is wrong, but the reasons people do wrong things are human, not political. The 6.22 woke score comes from the diverse high school ensemble and some contemporary humor, modest by franchise standards.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: Homecoming
#6. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Brand New Day is the post-No Way Home reset, and it arrives with a new director in Destin Daniel Cretton and a new status quo for Peter Parker: alone, anonymous, starting over. The 13.09 traditional score is driven by the film's commitment to showing Peter rebuild his life through discipline and service rather than through shortcuts or self-pity. Jon Bernthal's arrival as a grounded antagonist brings a physical menace and moral weight that recall the best of the Netflix Marvel era. The 6.3 woke score, nearly identical to Homecoming's 6.22, comes from the diverse ensemble and some street-level social commentary that Cretton brings from his Short Term 12 and Just Mercy background. The result is a +7 traditional margin that places Brand New Day in a statistical tie with Homecoming, the two films bookending the Watts trilogy with nearly identical ideological profiles.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day
#7. Venom (2018)
The first Venom is a film that critics hated and audiences embraced, and the ideological profile explains part of that divide. Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock as a journalist who loses everything because he refuses to look the other way, a premise that is fundamentally about integrity and its costs. The symbiote relationship is framed as a symbiotic partnership that requires sacrifice and mutual accommodation, not a metaphor for anything political. Riz Ahmed's villain is a tech billionaire whose ideology is the standard corporate amorality that both left and right can agree is villainous. The 11.76 traditional score is modest but earned, and the 5.68 woke score is the second-lowest of any Spider-Verse film. At +6 traditional, Venom is a straightforward action movie that happens to be about a man and his alien parasite, and sometimes that is exactly what audiences want.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Venom
#8. Kraven the Hunter (2024)
Kraven the Hunter was widely dismissed before release as another Sony villain vehicle with no reason to exist, but its ideological profile tells a more interesting story. At 11.2 traditional and 5.4 woke, the film is a TRADITIONAL LEAN by a +6 margin that lands it in the same bracket as Venom. The traditional content comes from a narrative about a man shaped by an abusive father who channels his rage into a code: the hunt as ritual, nature as the ultimate arbiter of worth, and physical mastery as a form of self-respect. These are pre-modern values rendered without irony. The 5.4 woke score, the third-lowest in the Spider-Verse, reflects a film that simply has no interest in contemporary ideological signaling. It wants to be a violent action movie about a man who hunts things, and that is what it is.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Kraven the Hunter
MIXED
#9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Across the Spider-Verse is the most critically acclaimed Spider-Man film of the modern era and the most ideologically divided. The 10.64 traditional score is driven by the core parent-child relationships that anchor the emotional weight of the film: Miles and his parents, Gwen and her father, the theme of family as both burden and foundation. Those beats are real and moving. But the 12.59 woke score is impossible to ignore. The film's multiverse framework is used to advance an argument about systemic determinism: the Spider-Society, led by Oscar Isaac's Miguel O'Hara, insists that certain tragedies must happen for the multiverse to function, and Miles's rebellion against that order is framed as a progressive defiance of institutional authority. The visual language is saturated with identity-affirmation imagery, Gwen's arc is explicitly coded as a coming-out narrative, and the film's sympathies are entirely with the individual against the system. At -2 woke, Across the Spider-Verse is the inflection point where the franchise tips from traditional to progressive. It is a stunning achievement in animation that also happens to believe things that half its audience may not.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
WOKE LEAN
#10. Madame Web (2024)
Madame Web lands at #10 as the most woke Spider-Verse film, a verdict that will surprise exactly no one who sat through it. The film is an origin story that replaces the power-and-responsibility formula with a prophecy narrative centered on three young women destined to become Spider-Women, and the ideological shift is structural: the individual male hero is replaced by a female ensemble, the moral framework of earned heroism is replaced by destiny and self-discovery, and the villain's motivations are wrapped in corporate and patriarchal exploitation. At 13.42 woke and 9.15 traditional, the -4 margin is modest by the standards of some DC entries, but within the Spider-Verse it is the clear outlier. The trad score is not zero: there are gestures toward protection and maternal instinct that register, and Dakota Johnson's performance has a flat-affect sincerity that occasionally connects. But the film's governing sensibility is unmistakably progressive, and the result is a WOKE LEAN verdict that closes out this list where Sony's ambitions exceeded its judgment.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Madame Web
The Arc of the Spider-Verse
The Spider-Man filmography, ranked from most traditional to most woke, tells a different story from the DC or Marvel lists. This is a franchise whose ideological center of gravity is distinctly traditional: eight of ten films score TRADITIONAL or TRADITIONAL LEAN, and the two that tip progressive do so by modest margins of -2 and -4. There is no Birds of Prey in this group, no film that abandons the character's moral architecture entirely. Even Madame Web, the most woke entry on the list, is more confused than committed.
The reason is not that Sony Pictures is a conservative studio. It is that Spider-Man's core premise is impervious to easy ideological capture. You can gender-swap the supporting cast, you can add multiverse identity politics, you can foreground progressive themes, but the character at the center remains what Stan Lee and Steve Ditko built: a young man who learns that power without responsibility is tyranny, and that the measure of a hero is what he sacrifices, not what he gains. That idea resists redefinition because it is not an opinion. It is the geometry of the character. Change it and you do not have a different version of Spider-Man. You have a different character wearing the suit.
The Holland-Watts trilogy, which occupies three of the top five spots on this list, is the most ideologically coherent Spider-Man run since Sam Raimi's trilogy. No Way Home, Far From Home, and Homecoming are films that trust the character to carry the weight without ideological padding. The Venom trilogy, unexpectedly, is the second most traditionally weighted sub-franchise: Tom Hardy's commitment to playing the Eddie-Venom relationship as a bizarre love story produces traditional content that no one saw coming. The animated Spider-Verse films are the wild cards: visually revolutionary, narratively ambitious, and ideologically split in ways that reflect the larger cultural tensions that VirtueVigil exists to measure.
You do not have to agree with every score on this list to find it useful. The point of VirtueVigil is not to tell you what to think. It is to measure something that is usually left to vibes and give you the data to decide for yourself. The scores are transparent, the methodology is consistent, and every single film on this page links to a full review with a category-by-category breakdown. If you think a score is wrong, read the review and judge whether the evidence supports the number.
What is undeniable, looking at this list from top to bottom, is that Spider-Man remains the most ideologically grounded franchise in the modern superhero landscape. The character has survived sixty years of corporate ownership changes, creative team turnover, and cultural transformation without losing his essential shape. That is a testament to the strength of the original conception, and it is also a warning: the franchise is only one or two bad creative decisions away from following the path that turned DC's Birds of Prey into the most woke superhero film ever scored. The Spider-Verse is still standing. Vigilance keeps it that way.