Spider-Man was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and first appeared in Marvel comics in the 1960s. He was one of the first teenage heroes to have a leading role in comics and quickly became a big hit. 

“The Amazing Spider-Man” TV show ran from 1977 to 1981 and was the first time the character jumped from comics to live-action. Several attempts at a Spider-Man film failed in the 80s and 90s. In one, confused screen writers came up with a Spider-Man movie that had the character as more of a mutant horror monster than a human with supernatural abilities. Needless to say, Stan Lee was not impressed. However, by the early 2000s the webslinger was finally able to get his own time to shine in Hollywood.

“Spidey” is one of the most iconic superheroes of all time. The franchise has seen four iterations on the big screen and 10 different actors in the past 20 years. Each of the three live-action franchises has had its own traditional Spider-Man played by young upcoming stars. 

The release of the animated universe-bending “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” in 2018 saw several more actors take on diverse roles as different forms and iterations of the hero. (These are the 100 top grossing moving of all-time)

Spider-Man was one of the first films to kick off the modern era of the booming superhero genre with “Spider-Man.” Toby McGuire starred as the namesake hero in the 2002 blockbuster, trying to save the city and win the heart of his crush Mary Jane. 

Other movies, including “X-Men” (2000), “Daredevil” (2003), and “Batman Begins” (2005) also helped to plant the seeds for the behemoth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Ranking every Marvel movie from worst to best.

Click here to see all actors who have played Spider-Man, ranked

Methodology:

To rank all actors who have played Spider-Man, 24/7 Tempo developed an index based on Google search popularity, average ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator. 

Relative Google popularity for the search query of an actor’s name plus “Spider-Man” from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020, a neutral period with no Spider-Man film releases, came from Google Trends and was included in the index at double weight. 

The average IMDb user rating for all Spider-Man films starring each actor was calculated using the number of votes as weighting and was included in the index at full weight. The average Rotten Tomatoes audience rating and average Tomatometer rating were also calculated using the number of votes and reviews as weights and were both included in the index at full weight. 

To distinguish and rank the eight actors who portrayed Spiderman in “Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse,” an actor’s billing position in the IMDb list of top cast was included in the index.