WARNING: POSSIBLY TOO SPOILERY FOR SOME

Spider-Man: No Way Home should not work.

For one, turning Tom Holland’s third Spider-Man outing into a mega crossover with the other Spider-Man universes puts his own story into the background, or at least seemed poised to. For another, the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse already did a multiverse Spider-Man in 2018 and was an Oscar winning classic, so there seemed almost no way No Way Home could look like anything but a second-rate…

After its unscheduled year off in 2020, the Marvel universe’s 2021 return had its biggest fireworks on television until Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Yet between early suspicions that Disney was setting up the MCU’s first Asian-led movie to fail in theaters, and backlash over Disney’s CEO labeling the movie an “experiment” – to the point where Shang-Chi himself Simu Liu objected as well – there weren't a lot of PR favors done for this one...until the…

In a way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Pixar have something in common besides being owned by Disney. When Pixar launched, it had an unbroken string of masterpieces from 1995 to 2011, until Cars 2 became the first poorly reviewed Pixar film. A decade later, the MCU also had an unbroken string of positively reviewed films – though only a few were dubbed anything close to masterpieces – until the Eternals.

Now countless critics are surely jumping at the bit,…