Of all the doors into Spider-Man’s film history, Spider-Man: Homecoming remains the easiest to walk through, and Netflix subscribers have a firm deadline for it. The 2017 film, Tom Holland’s first solo outing as Peter Parker, leaves the Netflix catalog on October 1, 2026. Its exit comes as Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Holland’s fourth solo film, dominates theaters after its US release on July 31, 2026.
Polygon’s Ryan Epps makes the case that Homecoming is the right place to start a rewatch, even with Sam Raimi’s early-2000s trilogy, Andrew Garfield’s 2012 take and the animated Into the Spider-Verse films available as options.
At a glance
- Director: Jon Watts
- US release: July 7, 2017
- Running time: 133 minutes
- Stars: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Zendaya, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau
- Netflix exit date: October 1, 2026
No origin story, and that’s the point
Homecoming skips the radioactive spider entirely. By the time it opens, Peter has already been through his big MCU introduction in Captain America: Civil War, trading blows with Captain America, the Winter Soldier and Falcon. He comes back to Queens with a flashy new suit, then gets ignored by Tony Stark for months. What follows plays like a John Hughes teen movie with web-shooters: decathlon prep, awkward crushes and street-level crime rather than a battle to save the universe.
The threat comes from Adrian Toomes, played by Michael Keaton. He’s a salvage contractor whose crew was driven out of business after the Battle of New York by a Stark-backed venture. Toomes turns scavenged alien tech into black-market weapons and flies a winged suit as the Vulture. The film roots his villainy in working-class resentment, not a plan to end the world, and draws on the Department of Damage Control to show the blue-collar fallout of superhero battles. Its best scene has no CGI at all: a car ride in which Toomes works out that his daughter’s homecoming date in the passenger seat is the masked kid wrecking his business.
The famous timeline slip
The film also contains one of the MCU’s best-known continuity errors. It opens right after 2012’s The Avengers and then shows an “Eight Years Later” title card, which can’t be right, since Civil War and Homecoming are set in 2016. Marvel later corrected the timeline in its official guides.
At release, some fans complained that Peter relied too heavily on Stark tech, with a suit that has its own AI and an “instant kill mode”. Epps argues that looking back, this was setup: the film hands Peter an over-engineered crutch and then takes it away, which lays the groundwork for the more self-reliant hero of Brand New Day. Homecoming isn’t the best live-action Spider-Man film. What it does deliver is the version of the character fans had long wanted to see on screen: a Queens high schooler trying to do the right thing.
