After directing a run of cult favorite — if not always financially successful films in the 80s and early 90s, Sam Raimi made a trio of mid-budget, character-centric films — A SIMPLE PLAN, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME, and THE GIFT — before turning his attention to one of his favorite comic book characters from his childhood, Spider-Man.

Getting there wasn’t easy. There was a decades long journey to get Spider-Man to the big screen, fraught with false starts and stops. But when Raimi got ahold of the material, he brought the same enthusiasm to blockbuster filmmaking that he’d brought to the no-budget horror films that he was making in the woods with his friends decades earlier.

The resulting franchise is credited for being the true beginning of the current superhero movie boom, proving that characters from the pages of funny books could also be the subject of films that were both financially and critically successful.

In this series, we’ll explore the character of Spider-Man from his early TV appearances all the way through the production and release of Raimi’s trilogy of films.

Related Series: Sam Raimi: The Entertainer