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Marvel's Spider-Man franchise has become one of the film and comics industry's biggest ongoing money-spinners, spanning cinema, animation and print. The latest live-action instalment, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is a Marvel Studios and Sony production directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, with Amy Pascal producing; it follows on from earlier films starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker, the character's secret identity. The character has also been reinterpreted in animated form through Miles Morales, a different young hero who took up the Spider-Man mantle in Sony's separate animated film series.

Mary Jane Watson is one of the longest-running characters in Spider-Man comics, traditionally known as Peter Parker's love interest since her debut sixty years ago. Over the decades she has increasingly been developed as a character with her own storylines rather than existing solely in relation to Spider-Man, a shift Marvel's publishing arm continues to explore in new comic releases.

Beyond individual releases, Spider-Man functions as one of the entertainment industry's most closely watched franchises because of the scale of money involved and the way its various strands, films, comics and animation, are coordinated to sustain interest between major releases. Box office performance for a film like this is often used as an indicator of broader audience appetite for superhero cinema, which makes results and forecasts a recurring point of industry discussion.