If there’s one thing everyone knows about the character of Spider-Man, it’s that his uncle was murdered and that this inspired him to take up a life of vigilantism. Yet in the latest franchise reboot, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Uncle Ben never appears. So why is Uncle Ben not in this movie? Was he still murdered in this universe, or does Tom Holland’s Peter Parker have a totally new backstory?
According to Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, it’s not as if Uncle Ben never existed in this universe. It’s just that Marvel feels that Spider-Man’s origin story is so famous that it wasn’t really necessary to depict it on screen for the third time.
“The truth is, we want audiences to bring their own… let them fill in those blanks right now,” Feige told CinemaBlend. “They’ve seen the other films. They’ve read comics. They can fill that in.”
Director Jon Watts made a similar statement in an interview with Comicbook.com.
“We never talked about showing it, because the MO was always to not show anything we’ve seen before,” Watts said. “If anything ever felt slightly familiar, to try to figure out if there’s a way to avoid it or tackle it in a different way. But that was something that definitely felt like we’ve seen that before.”
It sounds like at some point we will learn more about the backstory of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, though. Kevin Feige told CinemaBlend, “What the specific facts are in the past, we don’t… we haven’t revealed yet.”
It’s for this same reason that Spider-Man: Homecoming does not feature a scene of Peter Parker being bit by a radioactive spider. At this point, virtually everyone seeing the film will know Spider-Man’s origin; he’s not exactly an obscure character who audiences must be slowly introduced to. If there were to be an Uncle Ben death scene in Homecoming, it would be the third time the character was killed on screen in 15 years.
In addition to Spider-Man’s roles in the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies like Avengers: Infinity War, there will also be two sequels to Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first of which will be released in the summer of 2019.