The Best Movies of 2023: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse‘s Superheroic Parenting

Stage magicians have abracadabra; dads have “don’t tell Mom.” The former gets you a rabbit from a hat, a cheap bouquet from a tailcoat’s sleeve, the ace of hearts you picked from a deck of cards. The latter gets you anything: a brownie (or two) before dinner, an extra episode (or three) of Bluey, or permission to help hold the drill while installing new bookshelves on the living room wall. Don’t tell Mom: We’re watching The General for the first time. Don’t tell Mom: We’re making bubble bombs with vinegar and baking soda. Don’t tell Mom: We’re dimension-hopping to Earth-42 to save a fellow Spider-Man from certain doom. Peter B. Parker drops the last of these in the final moments of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson’s sequel to the groundbreaking Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Having spent almost all of his scenes in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with his toddler daughter Mayday strapped to his chest (excepting the moments where she’s slinging her very own webs), Peter is tired. Spiderhood confers all sorts of nifty powers upon those bitten – super strength, speed, agility, and durability, and spider-sense, a dual-purpose gift for crimefighters and parents alike – but fatherhood confers the greatest power of all: an uncanny knack for falling asleep at any time while doing anything.

Wrapped in a pink bathrobe, with his trusty paperback copy of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk propped up on his chest, Peter snoozes. By contrast, Mayday, like all one-year-olds, will wake up unpredictably from deep slumber with even the slightest stimulus. Peter rouses from sleep to Mayday hanging upside-down from the ceiling by a web, pointing at the quantum physics event occurring outside her bedroom window; he plucks the tyke from her thread, looks outside, and sees Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), determined and desperate, staring back at him. They exchange no words, because none are needed: Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is in trouble, and needs their help. So Peter answers the hero’s call the only way he can as a Spider-Dad-Man: “Don’t tell Mom.”

It’s a moment so brief as to appear a cutesy throwaway. He whispers the line to Mayday, who looks up at him with stunned childish awe; Dad isn’t just inviting her to get in good, wholesome trouble with him, and she knows it. He’s inviting her to answer the same call Gwen wordlessly makes to him from the Parker family’s roof deck. This isn’t workaday paternal cheekiness. This is serious. So Mayday takes it seriously: She pulls her knitted Spider-beanie over her smiling face, her version of suiting up to save the day. Like dada, like daughter.

Your friendly neighborhood Department of Children and Families, not to mention fussy moralists and scolds in the audience, may take exception to a superhero participating in “bring your child to work day.” Crime never sleeps. Kiddos need to. Crime is typically dangerous, contextualized in the mores of the superhero comic book. Bringing a little kid to a supervillain throwdown seems like the definition of bad parenting. In fact, Mary Jane Parker (Melissa Sturm), Peter’s patient, understanding, no-nonsense main squeeze, brings up that very point herself, minutes before Gwen arrives. “Did you bring our baby to another fight?” she asks, voice pitched in a rhetorical key; she knows the answer, but she tosses the question out there anyway. 

Peter does the dad thing: he bullshits. “No. No, no,” he sputters. “‘Cause you asked me not to. So I didn’t. I wouldn’t.” Mary Jane lets the obvious fib go. Each is tuned into the other’s unspoken meaning. But she’s sensitive to Peter’s insecurities, and his duty as Spider-Man, and, in stark disagreement with how social services might characterize the situation, accepting of his circumstances, and Mayday’s by default. “There’s no playbook for raising someone like her,” she says, “or being someone like you.” She punctuates her words with kindness, not just out of love for her husband and their daughter, but out of intrinsic acknowledgment that Peter will take Mayday with him to the next fight – and the next, and the next. He can’t help it. He’s a hero; it’s in his nature. He’s a dad; it’s in his heart.

“Don’t tell Mom” could be seen as deception. A secret kept between Peter and Mayday, and from Mary Jane, is, after all, a kind of lie. But Peter knows Mary Jane expects him to buck the rules of childrearing, even if she’d rather he not; telling Mom would, in its way, be a redundant gesture. If there’s no playbook for raising Mayday, then Peter has to write one himself. Is whupping the asses of anyone from Spidey’s rogue’s gallery – Green Goblin, Scorpion, Rhino, Doctor Octopus, the Vulture – with Mayday in tow a good idea? Probably not. But Mayday isn’t just a kid. She’s a superhero-to-be. One day, it’ll be her turn to whup bad guys’ asses, japing them down to size before wrapping them in a web. “Don’t tell Mom” is Mayday’s biggest step toward her future mantle as successor to her dad’s legacy; it’s Peter’s way of preparing her for what’s waiting for her as she ascends to adulthood as a Spider-Person. 

It’s also Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s way of dovetailing the arcs of Peter and Miles. In the film’s third act, we learn that Miles is an anomaly; all Spider-Persons are bound to canonical events essential to shaping them, and that disrupting these experiences is an existential threat to all universes everywhere. Miles wasn’t supposed to be bitten by the spider that gave him his powers, but he was bitten, and this cross-reality oopsie set in motion the birth of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s main villain, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), effectively a walking portal generator with designs on spatial mayhem. Miles is brought to Earth-928 and the headquarters of the Spider-Society, comprising countless Spider-People of all makes and models; here, he is educated on the sacrifices all Spider-Folks must make, and all suffering they must endure, as part of their sacred trust. 

But the Society isn’t just a place of learning and wisdom. It’s a prison. Miles’ dad, Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry), is doomed to die – one of Miles’ canonical events. Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), head of the Society and something of a tyrant, intends to keep Miles on Earth-928, where he can’t save Jeff and throw the Spider-Cosmos into further disarray. This sits poorly with Miles, who escapes in grand fashion just after taking one defiant parting shot at Miguel. “Everyone keeps telling me how my story is supposed to go,” he practically spits. “Nah. I’m gonna do my own thing.” 

His “own thing” puts him in mortal danger and leaves Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on one of the greatest cliffhangers of recent blockbuster memory – a “to be continued” earned through the preceding two hours and change worth of punchlines, punches and moral dilemmas. But the risk Miles takes to serve his self-actualization as a young man offers Peter implicit inspiration to do the same. He worries whether he’ll be any good at being a dad, as all dads do; most dads can’t spin a web any size, or catch thieves just like flies, so his hand-wringing about raising Mayday is as much about parenting basics as about the Parker specifics. Gwen showing up at his home is the chance he needs to satisfy both anxieties, to prove that he can give Mayday the nurturing all children need alongside the mentoring required by super-children. 

The filmmakers want the audience to take Peter’s responsibilities to Mayday as seriously as he does. In the climax’s team-up shot, a cluster of Spider-folks gather around a portal Gwen has opened to (presumably) Earth-42: Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), Margo Kess (Amandla Stenberg), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), alongside Spider-Man Noir and Spider-Ham (whose voice actors in the first film, Nicolas Cage and John Mulaney, don’t have any dialogue here). Peter and Mayday stand at the front of the line, waiting for the action shot where the assembled Spider-Crew thwips toward the camera and through the portal. Look closely, and you’ll see it: Peter’s determined, steely smirk, underscored by Mayday’s toothy smile, her face aglow with the pure joy known only by a child on a new adventure – one she gets to share with her doting Dad. Peter has nothing to worry about. He’s doing his own thing, and Mayday is, too.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.