Clues About Spider-Man: Homecoming In Captain America: Civil War

"Spider-Man will return." These are the words that pop up on the screen after the post-credits scene in Captain America: Civil War, and even though just about everyone in the audience already knew it before the lights even went down in the theater, the long-awaited introduction of everyone's favorite wall-crawler into the Marvel Cinematic Universe proved to be so perfectly executed that the buzz surrounding Spider-Man: Homecoming has grown downright deafening. So what can we expect from Spidey's new big-screen adventure when it hits screens in the summer of 2017? Captain America: Civil War might offer a few clues.

For those of us who've been there through five feature films and any number of Spider-Man animated series, it's almost become a chore to have to sit through yet another interminable take on the same old story: Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and gains its proportionate strength, along with a variety of other spider-centric attributes. That's why Spidey's introduction in Captain America: Civil War was so great: it bypassed pretty much all of that stuff, taking it on faith that the audience probably already knew about the character's background. Although it's inevitable that a certain amount of Spidey's not-very-secret-anymore origin will end up being rehashed to some extent, the evidence as it stands leads us to believe that Homecoming will be a primer rather than a detailed examination.

When Tony Stark pays his visit to Peter Parker during Civil War, Tony expresses what the entire audience is thinking: Aunt May is hot. Needless to say for anyone who's ever picked up an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, this is not the typical portrayal of May Parker, but if Peter is being portrayed as a 15-year-old high school student, then it's perfectly reasonable to hire Marisa Tomei to play May. In turn, if you're going to hire someone with Tomei's acting chops, then you might as well utilize her. But given that Tony Stark, a guy who could have any girl he wants (except, apparently, Pepper Potts), is so obviously smitten with May, there's no way they're not going to play up the character's youth, vibrancy, and general gorgeousness in the film.

This would be a reasonable enough deduction just based on the fact that Robert Downey, Jr. has been confirmed as reprising his role as Tony Stark for Spider-Man: Homecoming, but many have wondered why, of all the possible options Tony had available to him, he opted to add a 15-year-old kid to his Civil War team. The most likely presumption is that Tony looks at Peter—a kid who's incredibly smart and has a smart-aleck persona that he slips on when the need arises but is still dealing with the residual effects of having lost his parents when he was young (not to mention the much more recent death of his uncle)—and sees way too much of himself to not do whatever he can to help young Parker find his way.

If you stuck around for the post-credits scene, then your heart likely came within an inch of leaping out of your chest at the sight of the Spider-Signal, a handy-dandy little device that Spider-Man has often used in the comics to suddenly announce his presence to criminals lurking in dark alleys. The fact that Tony Stark has provided Peter with this item as one of the upgrades he promised doesn't mean that he's going to be breaking it out every five minutes, but it does suggest that we'll be seeing it at some point during Homecoming. More importantly, it also begs the question, "Just what other upgrades has Stark provided?"

As it stands right now, there's no reason beyond mere wishful thinking to anticipate that Chris Evans will be popping up in Homecoming, but it's impossible to reflect on the moment that Captain America realizes that Spider-Man is from Queens and smirks that he's from Brooklyn without considering the possibility that Cap could see Spidey as a kindred spirit who might be swayed onto his side of the war. But just because Cap might not be in the film doesn't mean that someone else from his side couldn't show up...like, say, Hawkeye, who could certainly appreciate Peter's position of wanting to make sure that those closest to him don't suffer any fallout from being related to a superhero.

For the first time ever, we're getting a Spider-Man who's a proper teenager, a 15-year-old science geek who may have extraordinary physical abilities but who still initially balks at the idea of being a part of Tony Stark's team because he's got homework. As such, the title of the film is almost certainly going to involve an actual high school homecoming at some point, and when there's a homecoming, there's a dance, and...well, what we're saying is that there's an extremely strong chance that we'll see way more of the human side of this superhuman. Peter Parker's status as a nerd with an incredibly small circle of friends has always been a staple of the Spider-Man mythos, but this is the franchise's big chance to make the character more relatable than ever, and it looks like they'll run with it.