Hidden Details You Missed In The Spider-Man: Homecoming Trailer

A new Spider-Man movie is, well, nothing new—next year's Spider-Man: Homecoming will mark the web-head's sixth big-screen outing. However, it is the first solo movie in which Spider-Man is officially part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, allowing him to rub shoulders with Tony Stark and aspire to one day join the Avengers. Now that the first trailer for Homecoming has dropped, fans are analyzing every quip, thwip, and clip. There are quite a few hidden details waiting to be unmasked, and your friendly neighborhood Looper has collected them all here for you.

When Tom Holland made his debut as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, part of the plot found Tony Stark deliberately keeping Peter Parker's powers—and his very existence—something of a secret from the superhero world at large. This allowed him to call Peter in to help fight Captain America and the others, which clearly gave Peter the inspiration to fight bad guys on a larger scale. By the end of that movie, the Sokovia Accords had been signed, forcing heroes to work with world governments rather than acting unilaterally. In the Spider-Man: Homecoming trailer, audiences can see police forces taking aim at Spider-Man while he clings to the Washington Monument.

There are any number of reasons why the police might think Spider-Man is an enemy, but the most likely is that, partly through Stark's efforts, they don't know who or what he is. Stark's secrecy was probably meant as a courtesy, an effort to allow Parker to enjoy his youth and a normal life (something Stark comes out and says in the trailer), but that means when Spider-Man shows up in Washington, he's an unregistered person with superpowers who's just a hop, thwip, and jump away from the President. In this scenario, it's understandable that the police would have no way of knowing he's a hero.

One of the mysteries surrounding this next Spider-Man movie concerns the "homecoming" part of the title. After all, it didn't seem young Peter Parker would be returning to anything he had left; if anything, he seems to aspire to move on to bigger and better things by joining the Avengers and helping Tony Stark save the world. However, a brief part of the trailer shows potential new love interest Liz Allan putting up a school banner reading "Homecoming is almost here!"

Of course, the title of the movie will likely end up having a secondary and deeper meaning, but this banner seems to crystallize the struggle that Peter Parker embodied in his early years—one foot firmly in the superhero world, and one foot in the life of an awkward teenager just trying to make it through the day. The banner seems to be asking students if they've asked anyone to the dance yet, a plot destined to highlight Peter's romantic loneliness. On a more meta level, that banner helps to excite fans by reinforcing that the movie itself is "almost here."

Long before the trailer came out, fans speculated about who Peter's love interest in the movie might be. Since this was a return to Peter's roots, many assumed that Spider-Man would hit the jackpot with a new portrayal of Mary Jane. Others wondered if Gwen Stacy would return in this rebooted universe. When Marvel cast Zendaya, fans wondered if she would be playing either Mary Jane or Stacey, which caused its own internet uproar when certain fans freaked out that a black actress might be portraying a white character.

Now that the trailer's here, though, it's apparent Marvel was throwing curveballs at audiences: Zendaya, who has only been identified by Marvel as "Michelle," primarily serves to throw shade at Peter while our hero's attention is on Liz Allan. In the comics, she was someone Peter liked in school, but she was busy dating jocks like Flash Thompson. Later, she figured out she did like Peter, but he'd moved on to Gwen Stacy and, later, Mary Jane. Liz eventually ended up marrying Norman Osborn's son Harry. In the trailer, it's likely that the focus on Liz is a bit of a misdirect and Michelle will end up being the true love interest, but it's interesting that Marvel's throwing a few extra romantic sparks in the air.

This one is a bit of a stretch, but not impossible. When it comes to the women in the trailer, most of the focus is on Liz (with Peter ogling her) and Michelle (calling Peter out for ogling Liz). But another scene shows a young blonde girl walking alongside Liz in the hallway. She has no dialogue or meaningful interaction with anyone, but she bears a notable resemblance to Gwen Stacy as portrayed in the comics.

The Peter of the comics ran in a small circle where everyone knew everyone, so it's entirely possible that her appearance in the trailer foreshadows a larger role in this movie and its inevitable sequels. One thing that would seem to increase this likelihood is Gwen's current popularity of the character within the comics. As readers know, Marvel recent introduced Spider-Gwen, a super-powered Gwen Stacy (from another dimension, natch) who fights crime while trying to survive high school. It may be only a matter of time before this young blonde engages in some cinematic superheroics of her own.

In a blink-and-you-miss-it moment as Peter walks through the hallways of his school, two fellow students seem to be carrying large, colorful scientific equipment. It doesn't seem like anything they'd have for a normal class, and it may point to some kind of scientific competition in the movie.

This isn't much of a stretch, as the teenage Peter Parker of the Marvel comics won awards at various science fairs. More recently, Miles Morales—a dimensionally displaced Spider-Man settling into the original Spider-Man's universe—showed his competitive streak at a science fair where he ran into fellow teen hero Ms. Marvel. While such a science fair will likely not be a huge part of Homecoming (if, indeed, there is a fair at all), it'll help to underscore Peter's scientific genius. Those smarts, much more than his fancy acrobatics, are likely at the center of his bond with Tony Stark.

In one of the funnier moments from the trailer, Peter's seen absentmindedly watching footage of his own exploits from Captain America: Civil War—specifically, the moment when his plan comes to fruition and the team starts taking down the giant-sized Ant-Man. During that sequence, Peter made both the Avengers and the audience feel ancient when he asked if they'd seen "that really old movie Empire Strikes Back," referring to the icy world of Hoth as "the snow planet" and the Empire's AT-ATs as "the walking thingies."

The Spider-Man: Homecoming trailer introduces audiences to Peter's best pal Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), and shows Ned discovering Peter's secret with a funny bit that reveals Ned's much more of a Star Wars fan. How can you tell? When he's surprised by seeing Peter walking on the walls, he drops a completed Lego Death Star. For Lego fans, this is its own moment of tragedy, as he's going to have to put nearly 4,000 pieces back together. In that same scene, the nose of an X-wing peeks into frame, and another shot shows what appears to be Star Wars figures near a lamp. Audiences will have to wait until July to figure out if Peter manages to alienate his buddy by calling the Death Star "that laser moon thingy."

Aside from their mutual love of pop culture, Spider-heroics, and Liz Allan's top, very few details are given in the trailer about Peter's friend, but longtime readers already understand just how sharply he's being reimagined.

The Ned Leeds of the comics was a reporter at the Daily Bugle who, through a complex web of brainwashing and tortured plots, became the villain Hobgoblin...or, depending on who was writing that day, simply someone who thought he was the Hobgoblin. While he seems unlikely to be part of any similarly dramatic plot twists in this movie, it'll be interesting to see if Ned's knowledge of Peter and his Spider-abilities is ever used for evil in future installments. Alternately, he may simply continue to play the role of friend and confidante, helping to separate Spider-Man from brooding loner heroes like Batman.

The trailer is deliberately stingy when it comes to doling out glimpses of Michael Keaton as the villainous Vulture, but one thing comics fans may notice right away is that this is a much more technologically-focused version of the character.

The original Vulture was technically powered by an electromagnetic harness, but his costume was made to look like it was covered in green bird feathers. The movie version of the Vulture looks like he's auditioning to be an Iron Man villain with his complex mechanical suit. The Iron Man comparison continues with one brief shot of the Vulture hovering over the camera, giving us a glimpse of technology that looks suspiciously like Iron Man's repulsor lifts. Part of the movie's plot may center on stolen weaponry (more on that in a bit), and if this is true, it would give Iron Man a personal stake in helping Spider-Man stop the Vulture. After all, keeping his technology from killing people was Stark's motivation going back as far as his first movie.

While Peter may have lost his geek cred in Civil War by not knowing some basic Star Wars names, the trailer goes out of its way to establish his nerdy bona fides through a series of dorky science t-shirts. When he's speaking to Tony Stark in Stark's car, Peter wears a t-shirt that reads "The physics is theoretical." While the rest of the shirt is cut off by the framing of the scene, the rest of the shirt's saying is "but the fun is real."

Peter's penchant for nerd humor continues in a later scene with Tony, during which Peter wears a shirt with two atoms having a conversation. "I lost an electron," the first one says. The second one asks, "Are you positive?" Interestingly, Peter seems to only wear these shirts when he's with Stark, which is an absolutely adorable way of trying to bond with the older scientific genius...or just suck up in order to get that Avengers job.

Earlier Marvel movies have often revolved around weapons technology getting into the wrong hands. In Iron Man, Tony Stark was horrified to learn that Obadiah Stane was selling Stark weapons to the Ten Rings and other shady groups around the world. In The Avengers, the titular heroes were shocked to discover that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been working to weaponize recovered alien technology as a way of fighting back against future alien invasions. This concern carried over to the Age of Ultron movie, in which the Avengers shut down Hydra bases that were protected with special alien technology.

There are a couple of quick shots in this trailer that indicate this plot may be making a comeback. In one scene, a henchman fires a powerful-looking laser blast towards something offscreen. In a later scene, the Vulture appears to be firing that same special weapon—or one very similar to it. It's possible that part of the movie's plot involves the Vulture stealing alien technology to use for his own selfish purposes. This would put added pressure on Tony to stop him, too, since he's a major reason half of the Avengers are currently on the run.

In one quick scene, Spider-Man escapes some trigger-happy police by gliding away using his "armpit webs." Casual fans of Spider-Man movies might wonder if this is some brand-new power added for the movie, or simply a tweak to his costume made by Tony Stark. And while the jury is still out about whether the webs are supposed to have been Tony Stark's idea, this design is nothing new.

In fact, having those armpit webs was a major part of Spider-Man's design in his very first comics, starting with his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15. The fact that Spider-Man is using them to glide in this movie may point towards a return to another classic trope of early Spider-Man comics: one of the problems he often encountered is that he would run out of webbing at the worst times, and on a poor teenager's budget, that stuff was hard to replace. The ability to glide from building to building means he'll have to use less of that precious stuff for transport, and can save it for webbing up bad guys.

Another blink-and-you-miss-it moment from the trailer is the appearance of Donald Glover—and if you didn't see him the first time, don't feel bad; he doesn't seem to be doing much besides standing by the mystery man who's firing the alien-looking blaster. Some fans have speculated this other man may be a version of the Shocker, but the international trailer shows someone else who looks more like the classic villain; this movie may have many side villains or possibly one related gang of electric bad guys, with Glover's colleague being one of them.

Fans online fervently tried to get Glover cast as Spider-Man in 2011, and Glover made a cute reference to this by appearing in Spider-Man pajamas in his comedy classic Community. Later, when Marvel was creating a different Spider-Man character for their Ultimate line of comics, they created a black Hispanic character named Miles Morales, who creator Brian Bendis said was influenced by Glover. Morales developed quite a fan following of his own, and many fans hoped Glover would eventually portray the character he helped inspire. Glover did eventually voice Morales in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon and some fans continue to hold out hope that he might somehow play that character in this movie, but in the trailer, he looks more like he might be a bad guy.

Much of the audience's attention goes to Tony Stark in this trailer, but another Avenger makes an appearance—albeit one that's really easy to miss. In Peter Parker's science class, he's busy watching footage of himself kicking ass during Civil War (did the guy from Luke Cage sell him a Blu-ray?) when his teacher calls him out for not paying attention. Above her are pictures of some of the greatest scientists in history, ranging from Albert Einstein and Nikolai Tesla to female science pioneer Marie Curie...and Bruce Banner.

It's actually very interesting to see Banner on the wall because it would imply that the rest of the world acknowledges him as a brilliant scientist rather than as the rampaging Hulk. This seems to either be a soft reboot of Hulk's story or a subtle revelation about a change in status quo, because as far as the world knows, Banner's science experiment on himself ended in tragedy, and he was very publicly confronted by the Army on a college campus before destroying half of Harlem in his dramatic fight with the Abomination. While it's true that he's gone on to save the world on multiple occasions, it seems a little weird that he'd be honored for his failed science rather than his superheroism.