Jon Watts

Tom Holland lets Peter Parker look painfully young in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), especially when trying to do the right thing leaves him unsure what to do next. Jon Watts gives that uncertainty time to register. We were moved by Holland’s strained face as Peter tried to meet a responsibility he was scarcely ready for. Zendaya’s MJ and Jacob Batalon’s Ned Leeds matter because Watts lets their relationships with Peter occupy space between the fights. This is where we rate him: directing people whose worries remain worth following when the spectacle stops.

His early features, the horror film Clown (2014) and the thriller Cop Car (2015), were co-written with Christopher Ford. They built tension in everyday American settings, on a smaller scale than the superhero films that followed. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) gave him much more to manage, but Peter’s school life kept young people’s concerns in view. It was a sensible appointment for films that needed their hero to seem young.

By No Way Home, keeping that intimacy takes effort. Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osborn is unsettling because he enjoys being dangerous, and Watts gives him room to make that pleasure felt. Alfred Molina’s Dr Otto Octavius can turn dialogue into a confrontation. The computer-generated fights are visually ordinary and seldom offer a comparable threat. There is pleasure in these returns, but recognition is too often allowed to hold up an already crowded story.

After the trilogy, Watts directed and co-wrote Wolfs (2024), with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. His story credit on Final Destination Bloodlines (2025) brings him back to horror, though it would be careless to treat it as a film he directed. We enjoyed its inventive deaths and jokes, even if the rest cannot quite match the opening twenty minutes. Start with No Way Home if the earlier Spider-Man films are familiar, and watch how much Holland can do when Watts gives him time.