James Proclaims!

As December 2024 officially begins today, it is time for my annual tribute to films, which may not have been intended as Christmas movies but which nonetheless contain some, admittedly often tenuous, links to the season. This is my eighth consecutive year of doing this and even I stopped seeing the point of this endeavour some years ago.

I concluded last year’s countdown with the rather brilliant Spider-Man: No Way Home. This resulted in me revisiting all of the other Spider-Man movies, and I was delighted to discover that I could, by the flimsiest of rationales, justify including the Web-Slinger’s original 2002 cinematic outing.

Given the plethora of superhero movies already in existence by 2002, it seemed genuinely crazy that Spider-Man had never been on the big screen prior to this point. The technology required to make a credible Spider-Man movie had clearly existed for a while by that point but there was apparently a ‘rights’ issue that kept the movie on ice for years.

Fortunately when the first installment of Sam Raimi’s trilogy did make it onto our screens it was very much worth the wait. Given how many superhero movies now exist, it’s credit to this movie that some 22 years on, it still stands out as one of the very best.

Score for Christmasishness

As mentioned above, my rationale for including this is very tenuous. But there is a scene in which the main characters celebrate (or at least attempt to celebrate) Thanksgiving. And then stuff happens after that scene. It’s not entirely clear how much time transpires between that scene and the end of the movie, but you’d have to imagine that, as Spider-Man and the Green Goblin have their final battle, they’re at least thinking about what their plans for Christmas might be.