How I would have introduced Spidey to the MCU
(bear in mind if this had happened in the same timescales as homecoming, this would have come out before Spider-verse. Spiderverse is good enough that I’m kinda glad they didn’t do this but hey, this is all theoretical.)
we start with an adult Peter - bonus points if he’s played by Andrew Garfield although that’s unlikely for reasons that will become clear - at the height of his powers. He’s an adult with a good job, he’s married to Mary-Jane, things are generally going great. He has a nightmare about Gwen Stacey early on his solo movie, so he know he’s seen some shit, that this is a Spiderman who’s been around the block a time or three.
He first appears as a guest star in an Avengers movie, some people love it, some people hate it, everyone is talking about it.
And then he dies at the mid-point of his first solo movie, leaving his protege Miles Morales to try and fill the gap, and he manages it, he defeats the Goblin and saves the day, but there’s no resolution to their relationship, Peter is just dead and Miles is just doing his best to cope.
Miles gets some cameos in other movies, and then we get to his second solo movie. And Peter is there. Miles doesn’t know why, but Peter says he survived somehow, he was just in a coma, and Miles is so fucking relieved, finally he has a mentor again! It seems almost too good to be true!
And maybe it is, because people seem to be afraid of Peter, and bodies start turning up with skin missing from their faces, shaped like a handprint, almost like someone with sticky hands has just...
But it can’t be Peter, obviously. Peter’s a good guy. Sure sometimes it seems like he doesn’t know Miles at all, sometimes there’s these weird gaps in his memory, and eventually he confesses he doesn’t remember being in the hospital at all, and he’s having these nightmares, or nightmare really, this recurring nightmare about a Jackal and a girl with blonde hair who he can’t save, but he’s a good guy. He’s Miles’s mentor. He’s his friend.
Anyway life’s hard enough as it is. He’s got this new science teacher, Professor Warren, who is a total asshole, detirmined to make his students suffer, and Miles is struggling to balance school and spiderman, he just wants to pass this year and make his parents proud. Although when he mentions this when he’s at Peter’s apartment one day MJ says that she and Peter had had a teacher in college called Professor Warren, and doesn’t know why Peter seems to have no memory of the guy.
Then on patrol one night, Miles catches the other spider-man, the one who’s been killing people, the one with the red and black suit that looks like an inverse of Miles’s suit, and he pulls the mask off to reveal... Peter.
Obviously Miles is horrified, so horrified that Peter gets away. He goes to confront Peter at his apartment, but Peter insists he hasn’t left all night and Mary Jane backs him up. Miles can’t shake it though, can’t shake the suspicion, and he and Mary Jane start to investigate.
He starts to realise just how wrong things are when he fights the Red and Black spiderman again and he doesn’t know Mary Jane, doesn’t know Miles, doesn’t even react to the name Peter. In fact when Miles calls him that, in an attempt to appeal to his better nature, he replies that Miles is thinking of someone else, that his name is Kaine.
He escapes again, but this time Peter is waiting to tail him back to wherever he was coming from. And he says he found it, says they won’t believe what he’s found... and then the line goes dead.
Miles is able to figure out a way to retrace his steps, and Mary Jane insists on coming with him. He tries to tell her no but she’s detirmined.
What they find looks like a warehouse from the outside, but inside it’s a mad scientist lab, complete with things floating in tubes of bubbling green liquid. Well not so much things as people. Well not so much people as Peter. Peters. And a blonde girl, about Peter’s age.
Obviously the bad guy is revealed to be Professor Warren, the Jackal. He was in love with Gwen Stacey, even though she was his student and dating someone else, and he’s detirmined to clone her, but he figured he’d practise first on the person he blames for her death - Peter.
He releases Kaine from his tube, and he and Miles fight, and it’s not going well, but Mary Jane manages to release not!Peter who joins the fight. Then Warren gets a gun on Mary Jane while she’s trying to figure out the controls to release the not!Gwen, and not!Peter knocks it out of the way, but gets shot in the process. Mary Jane knocks Warren out and Kaine takes the opportunity to bail. Peter gives Miles a speech about how he’s passing the torch, about how Miles is the real Spiderman, and then dies in MJ’s arms. They release the teenage clone!Gwen and carry her out while the police turn up to arrest Warren. Our film ends with clone!Gwen waking up in the hospital and jumping so hard when Miles startles her that she ends up on the ceiling. Hanging from her finger-tips.
And our post credits scene is people smugglers in Mexico. We go full Batman, something in the dark, moving too fast to see taking them out one at a time, until the figure steps into the light to rescue the girl they’d been moving. She introduces herself as Aracely, and asks his name, and he says it’s Kaine. Kaine Parker. Cut to black.
Any that’s how I’d use the 2nd most hated spiderman storyline of all time to remove Peter Parker, establish Miles and a version of spider-gwen as both living in the same universe, set up MJ as a recurring character and mentor figure to the younger spider kids, and set the stage for a TV miniseries based on Christopher Yost’s Scarlet Spider run
