Episode 122 - Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021) (with Nick Jones)

Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The MCU comes calling once again for Episode 122 of the podcast, as Chris and Alex navigate the complex web of storylines and superheroes that build the world of Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021). Joining them to reflect on the genre’s enduring appeal alongside the contemporary pleasures of Hollywood’s increasing multiversal madness is Dr Nick Jones, who is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York. Nick is the author of the monographs Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (2015), Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture (2020), and the upcoming Gooey Media Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (2023), and his research focuses on digital effects, popular cinema, and interactive media. Listen as they discuss the complex place of Spider-Man within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the industrial power of the franchise reboot; superheroic nostalgia and post-pandemic realities of what it means to ‘move on’; the collective authorship of a character as it is crafted through actorly labour and VFX processes across disparate entries within a film series; digital de-aging and the virtual recreation of youth; the stakes of popular cinema’s turn towards the fractures of a multiverse narrative; and how Spider-Man: No Way Home offers a space where heightened levels of intertextuality and intensified emotion determine the importance of an exceptional individual as much as the value of connection.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Suggested Readings

  • Dyer, Richard. 2007. Pastiche. New York: Routledge.

  • Holliday, Christopher. 2022. “Retroframing the Future: Digital De-aging Technologies in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 5: 210-237.

  • Jones, Nick. 2020. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D and Visual Culture. Columbia University Press.

  • Jones, Nick. 2020. “Visual Productions of Urban Space: Lefebvre, the City and Cinema.” In The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society, eds. Michael Leary-Ohwin and John P McCarthy, 230-239. New York: Routledge.

  • Jones, Nick. 2019. “The Perpetual Motion Aesthetic of Action Cinema.” In A Companion to the Action Film, ed. James Kendrick, 99-117. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

  • Jones, Nick. 2015. Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory. London: Routledge.

PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantFRANCHISE, HOLLYWOOD, MULTIVERSE, ADAPTATION, COMICSComment