Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) (with Nick Jones)

The MCU comes calling once again for Episode 122 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex navigate the complex web of storylines and superheroes that build the world of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021). Joining them to reflect on the genre’s enduring appeal alongside the contemporary pleasures of Hollywood’s increasing multiversal madness is Dr Nick Jones, who is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York. Nick is the author of the monographs Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (2015), Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture (2020), and the upcoming Gooey Media Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (2023), and his research focuses on digital effects, popular cinema, and interactive media. Listen as they discuss the complex place of Spider-Man within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the industrial power of the franchise reboot; superheroic nostalgia and post-pandemic realities of what it means to ‘move on’; the collective authorship of a character as it is crafted through actorly labour and VFX processes across disparate entries within a film series; digital de-aging and the virtual recreation of youth; the stakes of popular cinema’s turn towards the fractures of a multiverse narrative; and how Spider-Man: No Way Home offers a space where heightened levels of intertextuality and intensified emotion determine the importance of an exceptional individual as much as the value of connection. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**