'Spider-Man' Can't Escape Its Own Hype

No matter what happens in Tom Holland's new film, it will be dwarfed by the years of spoilers, leaks, and harassing of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire that preceded its release. [View in Browser]( [Alternate text] [SHOP]( EXCLUSIVE [SUBSCRIBE]( ['Spider-Man: No Way Home' Will Be Remembered for What Came Before It]( ['Spider-Man: No Way Home' Will Be Remembered for What Came Before It]( Gather round, ye web-heads, let's celebrate this Spider-Man Eve with a tour of Peter Parkers of Years Past. Director Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy—yes, even the third one, which gave us Bully Maguire—will always be remembered for giving us some of the best superhero stories ever put to film, plus the countless other installments it inspired after Tobey Maguire hung up the Spidey suit in 2007. It surprised us. And now, nearly 20 years after its debut, Raimi's first Spider-Man movie feels like a museum exhibition for what it was like to enjoy a superhero film before the dawn of Reddit. Even the successor to that franchise, Marc Webb's two-film The Amazing Spider-Man series, which starred Andrew Garfield, still felt unspoiled by the doldrums of comment sections everywhere, lukewarm reception be damned. [Read More]( [The Water Is Rising Fast Around Mark Meadows]( [The Water Is Rising Fast Around Mark Meadows]( The House January 6 committee has drawn up a list of observations about the then-White House chief of staff's behavior in support of a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress. [Read More]( [Anne Rice Lived As Large as Her Gothic Fiction]( [Anne Rice Lived As Large as Her Gothic Fiction]( The author has died at the age of 80. [Read More]( [Emily St. John Mandel Is Nobody’s Prophet]( [Emily St. John Mandel Is Nobody’s Prophet]( The day the world shut down, Emily St. John Mandel was no better prepared than anyone else. Like so many people free-falling through March 2020, Mandel pulled her daughter out of school, battened down the hatches at her Brooklyn home, and descended into blindsided shock. Then, something strange happened: suddenly, invitations to write essays and op-eds poured into her inbox. Readers tweeted at her in droves, with some informing her that Station Eleven, her 2014 novel about a ravaged world rebuilding after a global pandemic, was becoming their Covid-19 life raft; others announced that they were staying the hell away from it. Throughout it all, the eerie refrain: “Station Eleven predicted the future.” When life suddenly, terrifyingly resembled her fiction, the literary world was desperate for Mandel to make sense of it all. [Read More]( [The 20 Best Pants to Wear to Work]( [The 20 Best Pants to Wear to Work]( All the options you need to head back to the office in style. [Read More]( [The 57 Best Gifts for Your Wife That She Won't Immediately Return for Store Credit]( [The 57 Best Gifts for Your Wife That She Won't Immediately Return for Store Credit]( You'll knock it out of the park with these ideas—a top candidate for all-time best partner of the century. [Read More]( [Frank Sinatra Has a Cold]( [Frank Sinatra Has a Cold]( In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966, and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself. [Read More]( [Exclusive Cyber Monday sale. 60% off Hearst magazines!]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2021 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019