Spider-Man 4 needs to make Peter Parker a more competent superhero by avoiding his worst habit in his MCU trilogy. The closing scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home introduced a new status quo for the young hero. With his Aunt May dead and the world having forgotten his existence, Peter was shown living alone, sporting a homemade, presumably Stark Tech-free costume. With that, the in-development Spider-Man 4 is poised to be a more mature take on the MCU's Peter Parker.
Spider-Man encountered many powerful adversaries over the course of his standalone films. In Spider-Man: Homecoming he goes up against Adrian Toomes, a.k.a. The Vulture, in a battle that takes him to D.C. and back. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, he faced Quentin Beck, a.k.a. Mysterio, who staged an attack in London, which Spider-Man eventually stopped, but resulted in his identity being outed to the world. Finally, in Spider-Man: No Way Home Peter Parker battled enemies from the MCU multiverse.
Individually, the Spider-Man: Homecoming plots are fine, but together they show a problematic habit: Spider-Man being directly responsible for most of the threats he faces. Aside from Vulture, Peter was to blame for nearly every major conflict he encountered throughout his three movies. Even in Homecoming, the Washington Monument incident occurred because his best friend, Ned, took a highly volatile Chitauri core—which Peter recovered from Toomes' crew—into the building. The film also saw Spider-Man unwittingly sabotage an FBI sting on a ferry where Vulture's weapons deal was taking place, ultimately resulting in the ferry's destruction. In Far From Home, Peter inherited Tony Stark's E.D.I.T.H. AI system, which he was tricked into giving to the duplicitous Quentin Beck. In No Way Home, Peter asked Doctor Strange to make the world forget his superhero alter ego. The former Sorcerer Supreme obliged, but the web-slinger sabotaged the spell, bringing people from other universes into the MCU—most of them being villains plucked from the moment before their deaths. Despite Strange's pleas to return the villains to their respective realities, Peter became reluctant to let them die, setting off a chain of events that led to Aunt May's demise. With Spider-Man 4 set to take Peter back to the streets, it has an opportunity to fix one of the character's biggest flaws: his penchant for creating world-threatening situations.
Spider-Man 4 Can Make Peter Parker A More Competent Hero After No Way Home
Spider-Man's missteps in the Homecoming trilogy are understandable, even if they were numerous. He was, after all, a wide-eyed teenager either trying to prove himself to more seasoned heroes or attempting to do right by those around him. But with his first standalone series having fully chronicled his journey toward maturity, Spider-Man 4 now has the opportunity to make him a more experienced and competent superhero. Peter Parker has gone through numerous life-changing events in the MCU. He fought the Avengers, battled Thanos, defended Earth from a large-scale alien invasion, and dealt with a major multiversal threat, on top of losing all of his loved ones in the process.
Having lived through all of that, it makes sense for Spider-Man 4 to depict Peter as a seasoned crime-fighter who's not as mistake-prone as his younger self. The No Way Home follow-up should give Spider-Man more agency, and show how much his experiences have affected his approach to being a superhero. In the comics, Spider-Man has been directly responsible for different tragedies in his life, including Uncle Ben's death and the violent fallout of his "Civil War" unmasking. The character has taken most of those experiences to heart, allowing them to inform his growth as both a person and hero. That is the kind of evolution that MCU's Spider-Man needs for his next story.
Watching Peter Parker stumble his way through the superhero world in his first trilogy was highly engaging. It was also a breath of fresh air for the MCU, given how, at the time of Homecoming's release, the franchise had mostly focused on experienced crime-fighters like Captain America and Iron Man. Yet, as entertaining as that depiction of the wall-crawler was, his teenage era has reached its natural conclusion. It's now time for Spider-Man to grow, and No Way Home gave Spider-Man 4 the perfect opportunity to introduce a mature Peter Parker who reacts to threats, rather than actively creates them.