Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland: The Spider-Man Debate Fans Never Settled

“I mean, among the three Spider-Mans we’ve seen so far, which one has been the best of all time?” It’s a question that’s followed the character through three separate film franchises.

Two studio reboots, and now over two decades of arguments, and it’s one that’s never really been settled, because each actor’s era makes its case in a different way.

Start with the numbers most people reach for first: box office. Across all three eras, the films have grossed a combined $7.94 billion worldwide, and Tom Holland’s trilogy accounts for the largest single share of that total, at roughly $3.94 billion.

A big part of that comes down to one film in particular, Spider-Man: No Way Home, which brought Maguire and Garfield back for a three-generation team-up and became the highest-grossing Spider-Man movie ever made, at nearly $2 billion worldwide, currently sitting as the eighth-highest-grossing film in box office history.

Critically, the picture is more mixed than the box office numbers suggest. Sam Raimi’s original 2002 Spider-Man holds a strong 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Spider-Man 2 is widely regarded by critics as the high point of the entire franchise at 93%.

But Maguire’s era also produced the trilogy’s low point: Spider-Man 3 dropped to 62%, weighed down by an overstuffed villain roster that’s become a common punchline in franchise retrospectives since.

Garfield’s two films, by most measures, represent the shakiest stretch for the character critically. The Amazing Spider-Man landed at 71%, and its sequel fell further to just 50%, reviews at the time pointed to an origin story that leaned too heavily on beats audiences had already seen from the Raimi trilogy, and a sequel that tried to juggle too many subplots at once.

It’s a large part of why that particular franchise ended after two films instead of three. Yet Garfield’s version has aged into something more fondly remembered than its contemporary reviews suggested, helped along by his return in No Way Home, where his performance, including an emotional moment tied to failing to save a falling MJ, unlike his own film’s ending, became one of the most talked-about elements of that entire movie.

Holland’s run, so far, is the most consistently well-reviewed of the three. Homecoming opened at 92%, Far From Home followed at 91%, and No Way Home matched Spider-Man 2’s high mark at 93%.

His fourth outing, Brand New Day, has continued that streak, opening above 90% as well, according to early tracking.

What makes the debate genuinely hard to settle is that each actor is, in a sense, playing a different version of the same character for a different era.

Maguire’s Peter Parker carried the awkward, nerdy sincerity that defined the character in comics for decades and gets credit for making comic book movies commercially viable in the first place.

Garfield leaned into a more emotionally raw, romantically driven take that fans have grown to appreciate more with distance from the films themselves.

Holland’s version, introduced already fighting alongside the Avengers, plays as the most integrated into a larger cinematic universe, trading some of the character’s original outsider quality for a broader, more consistently crowd-pleasing throughline.

Box office favors Holland. Peak critical acclaim is arguably split between Spider-Man 2 and No Way Home. And the most emotionally loaded moment among all three, Garfield’s redemption arc in No Way Home, didn’t even come from his own franchise.

However you weigh those factors is ultimately a matter of what you value most in the character, which is probably why, more than twenty years after Maguire first put on the suit, this is a debate that still hasn’t found a single, agreed-upon answer.

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