Uncle Ben says it in a driveway in 2002, and every Spider-Man movie since has been quietly trying to say it again.
None of them have managed it.
Spider-Man is the most popular superhero in the world, Marvel or not, and across comics, live-action, animation and everything in between, he’s racked up a lot of lines people can recite from memory. One of them still sits above the rest.
Tom Holland‘s franchise is on its way to becoming the biggest ever for the character. In box office numbers alone, it already is.
Three franchises, one line everybody remembers
Spider-Man’s live-action run makes a decent case that he’s the Marvel hero with the best track record of movie franchises so far. You can hold a grudge against Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 3. You can hold a bigger one against Andrew Garfield’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Fine. But both of the live-action franchises that existed before the MCU movie timeline introduced Holland’s Peter Parker did more good than bad.
Then there’s animation, where the Spider-Verse movies do something nobody else was doing. They center Miles Morales while filling the frame with Spider-Men and Spider-Women from all over the multiverse.
Stack up those 24 years and you get a pile of quotes that are emotional, inspirational, heartbreaking, hilarious, or somehow all of it at once. Plenty of them don’t even come from Peter.
That’s the thing about this franchise. It’s stuffed with fan-favorite characters played by people who know what to do with a good line. Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben. Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy. Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man. Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. Stan Lee himself. All of them have contributed, alongside the various Spider-Men.
The line your brain goes to first
Ask a fan for the greatest Spider-Man movie quote and watch how fast the answer arrives. It’s Robertson, in Maguire’s first movie, turning to Peter and handing him the motto he’d spend the rest of his life failing and then succeeding to live by.
“Just because you can beat him up doesn’t give you the right to. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility,” Uncle Ben said in the 2002 film.
That’s the most iconic quote in all Spider-Man media, and it works because it’s not a slogan. It’s a correction. Ben is telling a teenager to stand down.
It wasn’t even Uncle Ben’s line
Here’s the part most people have quietly forgotten, or never knew. The quote wasn’t originally attributed to Uncle Ben in the comics at all.
It first showed up as a narrative caption from Stan Lee at the end of Amazing Fantasy #15, the issue that marked Spider-Man’s debut and told the story of how he got his powers and how Uncle Ben died. Only many years later did it get handed to Peter Parker’s father figure.
The 2002 movie made that reassignment so permanent that the original barely registers anymore. Spider-Man is meant to protect people, and he can never forget it.
Every sequel keeps trying to rewrite it
Warning: this section contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
In the years since Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man, other movies with the character have kept taking runs at the line. The MCU films handed it to Tomei’s Aunt May, which made sense given Uncle Ben plays no real role in the shared universe. And it landed, because she says her version right before dying from injuries caused by Dafoe’s Green Goblin, the villain of Maguire’s first Spider-Man movie.
“With great power, there must also come great responsibility,” she says in No Way Home.
Then Brand New Day goes back to the well with a flashback that carries real weight for Peter. The moment comes right after Aunt May found out he was Spider-Man in 2017’s Homecoming, and it’s what finally gets Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey to abandon her mission for revenge and accept being a hero.
Tomei’s Aunt May, again, with another version of the line.
“That’s your deepest responsibility. Never forget that, no matter how powerful you become,” she says.
Three movies, three swings, one driveway in 2002 that nobody has topped.
