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Spider-Man: Homecoming

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Spoilers for all MCU entries preceding this one, including Captain America: Civil War will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Film)
Homework can wait. The city can't.

Tony: Don't do anything I would do. And definitely don't do anything I wouldn't do. There's a little grey area in there, and that's where you operate.
Peter: What — does that mean that I'm an Avenger?
Tony: ...No.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is a 2017 superhero film directed by Jon Watts, and the sixteenth entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as the fourth installment of Phase 3. Homecoming marks Tom Holland's second turn as Spider-Man in the MCU and, as the first movie in the Spider-Man: Home Trilogy, is the second Continuity Reboot of the Spider-Man films. In a first for the MCU, Homecoming is a co-production between Disney's Marvel Studios and Sony's Columbia Pictures division.note  On top of all of that, it's also the sixth overall installment in the Spider-Man film franchise.

Following his "field trip" battling the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War, New York City native Peter Parker continues trying to juggle his dual life as an Ordinary High-School Student at Midtown School of Science and Technology, and the crime-fighting hero Spider-Man. Now Peter must navigate impressing his new benefactor Tony Stark, getting ready for his high school's homecoming dance, catching bank robbers, finishing his homework on time, rescuing people from building fires, and learning how to talk to girls. Peter's greatest challenge lies in stopping a sinister criminal ring using an experimental flight suit and other high tech equipment to terrorize the city, despite Tony's concerns that he's too young to be putting himself in harm's way.

A sequel was announced for 2019 before Homecoming's releasenote . That movie, Spider-Man: Far From Home, initially concluded Marvel and Sony's partnership before they renewed it for a third movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home, released in 2021. An animated prequel series entitled Spider-Man: Freshman Year, which will cover an alternate retelling of Peter Parker's first year as a high school student and his origins as Spider-Man, is currently in development for Disney+, with Jeff Trammell (Craig of the Creek) attached as head writer. Spider-Man also appears in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, both of which are set between Homecoming and Far From Home.

Previews: Trailer Teaser, Trailer 1, International Trailer 1, Trailer 2.

Spider-Man: Homecoming provides examples of:

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    Tropes A to E 
  • Accidental Murder: Played for Black Comedy. When Jackson Brice threatens to blackmail Adrian, the latter responds by shooting him with a gun that completely disintegrates him. He then turns to Mason and says, "I thought this was the anti-gravity gun..."
  • Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: The conversation during the car ride when Peter and Liz are being driven to the homecoming dance by her father, Adrian Toomes, as well as afterwards, when Toomes warns Peter to stay away from him and his family, on pain of death.
  • Actor Allusion:
    • Michael Keaton plays The Vulture. He also played the title character in Batman, in which he flies his bat-shaped plane into the sky with the moon as a backdrop, briefly creating the iconic bat-symbol. In this film, when Toomes first meets Spider-Man, he drops him from the air and we briefly see his silhouette against the moon, which bears a strong resemblance to this scene. Keaton also plays the title character in 2014's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which speaks for itself.
    • Kirk Thatcher, who plays one of the two guys who shout to Spider-Man to "do a flip" carries a boombox. He's probably best known for the role of "Punk on the Bus" from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which he carries what appears to be the same boombox.
    • The man in the video Peter watches to learn how to tie a necktie has the Punny Name of "Dean Crimson" because he's played by Nitin Nohria, the real-life dean of Harvard (nicknamed "Crimson") Business School.
  • Adaptation Distillation: Since Peter was already the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man before the Civil War, we're spared yet another death of Uncle Ben and etc. and etc., but Peter alludes to it by talking about sparing Aunt May the difficulty of him being Spider-Man because of "everything that's happened lately".
  • Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Inverted. Likely due to there being FIVE movies about Peter's guilt in recent memory, his origin story is only vaguely alluded to here. His main character arc is about the conflict between his altruism and hero worship.
  • Adaptational Attractiveness:
    • The bald-headed, beak-nosed Vulture is played here by Michael Keaton, who looks much better than the bird-like villain that fans are used to.
    • Aunt May is usually portrayed as an elderly woman with white hair in her 60's or older. Marisa Tomei (who's 53, by the way) is significantly more youthful and vibrant, even wearing trendy jeans and tank tops. A Running Gag that started in Civil War is Tony making inappropriate remarks about how attractive she is, and she also catches the eye of a waiter serving them.
  • Adaptational Badass:
    • The Vulture costume is modernized, being an exo-suit Powered Armor with VTOL-like thrusters, clawed boots, razor wings, which can operate on remote control and has an array of other armaments. The comics Vulture is normally a green bodysuit with feathered wings on the arms, with his powers usually topping out at flight and enhanced strength.
    • Spider-Man's suit is built by Tony Stark and has a wide range of Iron Man-like abilities, including an AI, to help him.
  • Adaptational Intelligence:
    • "Flash" Thompson is more of an academic rival to Peter this time around rather than a standard jock type. Flash is still the dumbest in the class relatively speaking and is implied to only be there because of his father's money but he's more of a Know-Nothing Know-It-All.
    • Technically, all the students shown are smarter than their original comic book counterparts given that they're in a specialized school as opposed to a standard high school.
  • Adaptation Amalgamation: The MCU version of Spider-Man takes elements from multiple comic versions, including but not limited to:
    • The original 616 version of Spider-Man provides his origin and general look of his costume.
    • Ultimate Spider-Man with a younger Aunt May, having an experienced mentor (Fury/Stark) and sticking with a high-school-aged Peter with his own confidants and sidekicks to help him out.
    • The Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon with his advanced technology suit and specialized webbing, particularly Tazer Webbing. The way Peter describes his heightened senses in Civil War is reminiscent of Spider-Man 2099's "Accelerated Senses".
  • Adaptation Name Change: "Midtown High School" is renamed "The Midtown School of Science and Technology", implying that it's a specialized school for academically gifted students rather than a standard public high school. This is not too dissimilar to what was done in The Amazing Spider Man.
  • Advertised Extra:
    • Tony Stark/Iron Man is a downplayed example. While his role in the film is important, the amount of screen time he gets (well under fifteen minutes) is much less than it was in Civil War or either of the previous Avengers movies, and he only has one action scene. It seems to be more a case of Wolverine Publicity on Sony's part to drive home that yes, this is a movie set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
    • Donald Glover is given star billing in the movie despite Aaron Davis only appearing in two scenes, and has less screentime than those who didn't get star billing like Flash and Shocker.
    • Zendaya also gets star billing despite the fact Michelle has no impact on the plot and is mostly a gag character who pops up once every few scenes to say something snarky. Justified when, at the end, she says she goes by "MJ".
  • Age Lift:
    • Aunt May is in her early fifties, which is a lot younger than even the character's already Younger and Hipper Ultimate Universe counterpart, let alone the elderly (sometimes ailing) old lady in the 616 Universe.
    • In the comics, Ned Leeds and Betty Brant are both a few years older than Peter Parker, given that they've each been working at the Daily Bugle for a few years while Peter was just getting into working there. In this movie, they're Peter's age and go to school with him.
    • Phineas Mason (The Tinkerer) is an old man in the comics. Here, he's played by the much younger Michael Chernus.
    • Downplayed with Vulture. Michael Keaton is in his sixties, which is a bit younger than Vulture is usually depicted.
  • Alliance of Revenge: Subverted in The Stinger. Adrian Toomes, goes to prison and comes across Mac Gargan (a.k.a. The Scorpion), who tells him there is a rumor that Toomes knows the real identity of Spider-Man and offers to form an alliance as he plots an escape plan, stating how they both want Spider-Man dead. Toomes, however, chooses to keep Peter's identity a secret since Peter saved his daughter Liz's life, and claims Spider-Man would already be dead if he knew.
  • Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The Japanese version has an exclusive theme song titled "Never Say Never" by the band Kanjani∞.
  • Anachronic Order: The movie picks up a few months after Civil War, placing the events of the film in 2016 and before the second and third acts of Doctor Strange and before the events of the fourth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Although Aaron Davis is mentioned to be 33 years old, and his criminal record states a birth date of April 1984, which would set the rest of the movie in 2017 (present day). Confusingly, the film is also stated to be eight years after the events of The Avengers, despite it only being five years since that movie.
  • Analogy Backfire: Tony tries taking the euphemism "screw the pooch" to its logical conclusion. It doesn't pan out.
    Tony: Okay, that's not one of my better analogies.
  • And I'm the Queen of Sheba: When Ned tells the class that Peter knows Spider-Man and Peter says it's through his "Stark internship", Flash sarcastically says that he has a date with Black Widow too.
  • And Starring: "with Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr."
  • Animated Armor: Iron Man rescues Spider-Man from drowning, but it turns out to be just an empty set of armor that Tony is controlling remotely.
  • Animated Credits Opening: Well, Animated Closing Credits, showing Spider-Man's various superhero acts in a collage style with Limited Animation.
  • Answer Cut: In the film's opening scene, the Department of Damage Control takes over the cleanup of New York City from Toomes, who asks who their superiors are. Cut to a news broadcast with Tony Stark as the leader of this cleanup effort.
  • Anti-Climax: The second stinger is just a Captain America PSA where Marvel is essentially trolling those who waited for the credits to end.
  • Anti-Villain: Stark and the government weren't careful when they took over the clean-up after Loki's invasion of New York. Toomes was left on the hook for his contract and everything he subcontracted to take care of the clean-up. So he decided, in order not to lose his house, he turned into a weapons manufacturer.
  • Apologetic Attacker: As Toomes' modified wingsuit smashes through the warehouse, knocking over pillars he says: "Sorry, Pete", prompting Spider-Man to ask him what he's apologizing for since the wingsuit hadn't even hit him yet. Cue several tons of roof collapsing in on Peter due to the broken pillars.
  • Armor-Piercing Response: Tony manages to give Peter a silent one after the ferry incident. Having previously been rescued by a remote-controlled Iron Man suit, Peter angrily yells at Iron Man that if he actually cared, he'd be there in person. Cue Tony stepping out of the armor. Shortly after this, Tony tells Peter he's taking back the suit he gave him. Peter begs him not to because he's nothing without it, Tony just says "if you're nothing without this suit then you shouldn't have it."
  • Artistic License – Film Production: Applies to Peter's cellphone. When filming his video diary, regardless of whether it's held horizontally or vertically, the phone produces 4:3 ratio landscape videonote . It can also be set down on its side / edge without falling over, as if it had a larger base like a camcorder (or Peter balanced it tremendously in an instant), and while there are some cell phone covers that have a kickstand, there's no sign that his phone has such a cover.
  • Artistic License – Law Enforcement: Spider-Man scales the Washington Monument while being pursued by a police helicopter. Contrary to popular belief, police helicopters are not a frontline service; they're a support for the ground units, since it's hard to shoot accurately from a helicopter.
  • Artistic License – Physics:
    • It's fair to say that if a ferry were actually split down the middle from top to bottom, nothing would have stopped it from going under within a few minutes; big things sink slow. You know what? The point is the ferry would not have stayed up.
    • Peter grabbing an aileron (flight control surface that lets the plane bank) on the tail of the plane in the film's climax wouldn't have been enough to make the plane bank as hard as it did. It would have required all of the ailerons acting in concert to produce that sort of effect. Still, necessities of the story and all... though it would have been awesome to see Peter flipping around the plane to control the different ailerons in different directions...
  • Artistic License – Prison: At the end when Toomes is in prison, he's walking down the hall in a line of prisoners. His former crony Max Gargan is in another line of prisoners walking the other way down the opposite side of the hall. Both Toomes and Gargan stop in the middle of the hallway and have a conversation (Gargan wants to know who Spider-Man really is, but Toomes lies and says he doesn't know). Prisoners can mingle and talk freely in certain areas like the yard, but when moving inside the prison from one point to another, they have to stay in line and are not allowed to stop and talk, especially to someone moving in a different line.
  • Artistic License – Ships: The Staten Island Ferry is shown to have cars on it while Spider-Man is battling the Vulture's men, despite the fact that cars haven't been allowed on such ships since the '90s. Director Jon Watts handwaved this by saying that the world never implemented that rule in the MCU.
  • Art Shift: After the Distant Prologue, the whole of Peter's escapade to Germany from Civil War is filmed on his cellphone as a Vlog, up to the point of the discussion between Peter and Tony in the car. Fittingly, it serves the purpose of a "Previously on…" sequence for Spider-Man's involvement (although seen from a different viewpoint than in the last Captain America film), before tackling the current movie for good.
  • Ascended Extra: This is the second time that Liz Allan has appeared in a Spider-Man filmnote , but it's the first time she's been a central character.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • Captain America's suit◊ in The Avengers was frequently mocked by the fanbase (including Honest Trailers) for looking fairly goofy. In this film it returns, and it's played for cheesy comedy as Cap wears it while starring in a bunch of awkward educational videos.
    • The actors of the MCU are frequently subjects on the Web of the game "Fuck/Kiss, Marry, Kill". In this film, Liz and her friends play the game focusing on the Avengers themselves.
    • One of the mocking nicknames that Peter gets from Flash is "Penis Parker", which a quick search will confirm as a title and joke in innumerable examples of Youtube Poop.
  • Asshole Victim: Jackson Brice, the original Shocker. He learns the hard way that threatening Adrian's family is not only intolerable, but can potentially get you killed. It's no wonder that he's the only character that dies in the movie.
  • The Atoner: Tony here is trying to treat Peter better than he did in the previous film, especially since Peter got minor injuries from the airport battle.
  • Audience Participation Song: In the scene where Ned is outside of the dance party while Peter is away, Ned discourages him from coming back to the dance because of the members mocking Peter with this trope:
    Flash: When I say "Penis" you say "Parker"! Penis! Parker!
  • Badass Boast: Adrian Toomes (the Vulture) delivers one to Peter after figuring out his true identity.
    Toomes: ...don't you ever, ever interfere with my business again. Because if you do, I'll kill you and everyone you love.
  • Bait-and-Switch Time Skip: At one point, Peter is locked in a high-security vault, presumably until the lock releases in the morning. We see him trying out new web-shooters, working out, talking to his AI, Karen, looking at weapons, etc. It's implied that a lot of time has passed, but when he asks Karen how long it has been she reports that it's only been half an hour.
  • Bank Robbery: Spidey catches a team of bank robbers in the act. They wear Silver Age Avengers masks and are armed with Chitauri-enhanced weaponry.
  • Bathos: The typical Marvel practice of following up a serious event with a stupid joke is Subverted and Played Straight in the same scene: when Tony chews Peter out for trying to apprehend Vulture and Scorpion that results in an FBI sting being ruined and a ferry that would have sunk if Tony hadn't intervened, Peter weakly corrects Tony when he calls Peter a "fourteen-year-old" in the ensuing rant. Tony near-immediately blows up and raises his voice, which he almost never does, and promptly confiscates the Spider-Suit. It's Played Straight afterwards when Peter clarifies he doesn't have anything else to wear and has to go home in an embarassing t-shirt.
  • Bat Signal: The Spider-Signal appears in the movie after it was teased in The Stinger for Civil War.
  • Battle Amongst the Flames: The second half of the Final Battle takes place on a beach among the flaming wreckage of a jet.
  • Being Good Sucks:
    • Peter does the right thing by foiling Vulture's plot. Unfortunately for him, this results in Liz, Vulture's daughter and Peter's soon-to-be girlfriend, having to move to Oregon with her mom so they won't have to live with the stigma resulting from the scandal, ending their relationship.
    • A running theme for the film in general; like in Spider-Man 2, Peter has to repeatedly sacrifice his personal life and suffer the people he cares about thinking he's unreliable in order to do good as Spider-Man.
  • Belligerent Sexual Tension: Michelle alternates between antagonizing Peter and patently denying being obsessed with him.
  • Belly-Scraping Flight: The stealth cargo plane chops the top half off the Parachute Drop just before crashing into Luna Park, Coney Island.
  • Benevolent Boss: Adrian Toomes treats his employees with a very high degree of respect, especially the (new) Shocker, and they treat him equally well in return. The only time he actually kills one of them, it's a genuine accident when Toomes picks up the wrong gun, and the one he killed was being kind of a dick to him anyways.
  • Beta Outfit: Spider-Man's original Cheap Costume gets more time to shine here in the flashbacks and online footage we see of the wall-crawler. Later, he uses it again to fight the Vulture after Stark takes away the upgraded version of the suit.
  • Big Applesauce: The primary location of the film is, as usual, New York City. However, Spider-Man does go to Washington, D.C. for the Decathlon. Additionally, most of the NYC action takes place in Queens, with important sequences taking place in Staten Island and the finale takes place at Coney Island, rather than Manhattan.
  • Big Bad: The Vulture is the main villain Spider-Man has to take on, whereas the Shocker is his second-in-command and The Tinkerer is simply the man who arms the two.
  • Big Damn Heroes:
    • An Iron Man drone piloted by Tony saves Spider-Man from drowning when a parachute malfunctions.
    • After Spider-Man webs up the ferry to keep it together, he struggles to do so. Iron Man arrives and gives Peter the support he needs.
    • Also Ned when he uses Peter's web shooters to save him from being killed by The Shocker.
  • Big Good: Tony Stark and the Avengers fill this role. Spider-Man is not the single superhero in the world, as in his previous franchises: now there are others, more resourceful, with more infrastructure backing them, with higher experience in the superhero game, and that he may eventually join some day.
  • Big "SHUT UP!": From Tony Stark, uncharacteristically pissed when Peter petulantly corrects Tony calling him a "fourteen-year-old" during his angry rant about Peter screwing up and nearly causing a fatal disaster in trying to apprehend Vulture and Scorpion: "This is where you ZIP IT, alright?! The adult is talking!"
  • Bilingual Backfire: Mr. Delmar the deli owner starts a conversation in Spanish with his cook about how hot Peter's aunt is, only for Peter to also ask in Spanish how his daughter is doing these days.
  • Bilingual Bonus: The Korean church next to the Thai restaurant Aunt May and Peter go to is called the "Church of Asgard".
  • Bittersweet Ending: The Vulture and his crew are taken to jail while Peter earns the respect of both Tony and Happy, who decide that he's finally ready to join the ranks of the Avengers. However, Adrian's arrest forces Liz and her mother to move to Oregon, eliminating any possibility of a relationship with Peter. In the end, Peter chooses to decline Tony's offer to join the team, believing that's it's best for him to stick to street level for a while, and Tony, accepting his decision, returns his Spidey Suit so that he can continue to keep the city safe... and then Aunt May has a less than stellar reaction when she walks in on her nephew in the Spider-Man suit seconds later.
  • Black Comedy:
    • When Jackson Brice threatens to blackmail Adrian, the latter responds by shooting him with a gun that completely disintegrates him. He then turns to Mason and says, "I thought this was the anti-gravity gun..."
    • Mr. Harrington, the school supervisor of the Academic Decathlon team is revealed to have questionable qualifications as a chaperone.
      Mr. Harrington: As you know, we made it out alive. And that's the important thing. I couldn't bear to lose a student on a school trip. [beat, Thousand-Yard Stare] Not again.
  • Bookends: The film begins and ends with Peter failing a spot check and blundering his identity away to one of his loved ones in his bedroom.
  • Boredom Montage: Peter ends up locked inside a DODC warehouse, and initially decides to wait until morning when his suit's AI estimates the door will likely open. He kills time by goofing around, swinging on his webs like a bored kid, running the 'refresher course' on his different web settings, giving his suit's AI the name Karen while sitting in a web-hammock, discussing his life and his problems. When he's informed only 37 minutes have passed, he becomes determined to escape.
  • Both Sides Have a Point: In their argument after the ferry, Tony is absolutely right that Peter is a kid who shouldn't be throwing himself into dangerous situations, which Peter even acknowledges. For his part, Peter feels like he was pushed around by the fact that Tony's ignoring him and Happy ignored him even harder, to which Tony acknowledges but points out that the FBI was already on the case.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Averted. Peter is seen reloading his webshooters, using the spare cartridges on his belt, throughout the movie. He is also seen mixing up more batches and has an emergency cache in the school.
  • Bowdlerise: When Liz and her friends are playing "Fuck, Marry, Kill" with the first option only being addressed by the letter "F".
  • "The Breakfast Club" Poster Homage: One poster◊ used to promote the film puts nerdy protagonist Peter in Brian's position, popular girl Liz in Claire's position, snarky outcast Michelle in Allison's position, and academic bully Flash in Andrew's position. The only character who doesn't share surface characteristics to a Breakfast Club character is Ned, who's cocking a cowboy hat in the back.
  • Break Out the Museum Piece: Since his new costume is confiscated two-thirds of the way into the movie, Spider-Man is left to wear his older hand-made costume when he fights the Vulture and his henchmen during the final battle.
  • Breather Episode: This movie is wedged between two cosmic-based MCU films: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Thor: Ragnarok. While those movies focus on the grandiose, off-world aspects of the MCU and involve saving entire worlds, Spider-Man Homecoming is a smaller, more intimate movie about a teenage superhero going after a gang of thieves.
  • Brief Accent Imitation: Peter normally has a Queens accent, but when he first saves Liz, Ned and Mr. Harrington from falling in the Washington Monument elevator, he attempts to disguise his voice by putting on a deeper Bronx accent, saying, "Hey, how you doing? Don't worry, I got you.", which quickly slips back to his normal voice/accent as things start repeatedly going wrong with the rescue. It returns briefly when he finally gets Liz to safety with "So, is everyone OK?" just before his webbing breaks and he plummets down the elevator shaft.
  • Building Swing: Spider-Man is the poster child for this, but this film makes it very clear that it is only really effective when you're in a big city with a lot of skyscrapers. Half the film he is forced to hitch rides on trucks or just straight up sprint across open fields when he doesn't have a decent ledge to snag on to. Especially in contrast to prior films where he is in Manhattan or Brooklyn, he spends most of his time in Queens, which is more suburban in city design. When he has to climb the Washington Monument, he actually gets dizzy because he had never been that high up before.
  • Bullfight Boss: Inverted with Peter's penultimate fight with Toomes in the warehouse. Peter dodges every attack from the Vulture wings... but Toomes was trying to hit the pillars and collapse the building on Peter.
  • The Bus Came Back:
    • "Happy" Hogan returns to the MCU after having not been seen since he was critically injured in Iron Man 3.
    • In addition, Pepper Potts returns for the first time since that same movie, apparently having mended her Offscreen Breakup with Tony sometime following the events of Civil War.
  • Call-Back:
    • Adrian Toomes runs a salvage company turned gun running operation that steals and creates advanced weaponry. As a result, he has access to leftover weaponry and tech scavenged from supervillains, such as the Incident, the Dark Elves, Ultron, and Crossbones. He even holds up Iron Man's faceplate that was ripped off by Thor.
    • Tony is clearly upset when Peter says that he's nothing without the upgraded Spider-Man suit, which is exactly how Tony felt about himself in past films. This also brings to mind Steve's accusation of Tony in The Avengers. And just like Tony, Peter needs to learn that there's a lot more to him than a fancy suit and high-tech gadgets.
    • Tony and Happy mention The Vision, and say he's not a fan of doors. This was demonstrated in Civil War, where he casually entered Scarlet Witch's bedroom by phasing through her wall.
    • Captain America's hammy delivery of the PSAs and his "How many more of these?" at the end of The Stinger call to mind his War Bond rallies from Captain America: The First Avenger. The only thing missing was "The Star-Spangled Man with the Plan" in the background.
  • Calling the Old Man Out: In spirit if not in fact, given that the characters are unrelated, but Peter attempts to save face and get Tony to take him more seriously after the ferry incident by wondering aloud if Tony even bothered to show up at all (as the first time he "spoke" with Iron Man, it was a suit being remotely piloted by Tony while he was halfway across the world). Only to have Tony casually step out of the armor, causing Peter's argument to blow up in his face.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Peter's Stark-designed suit features an interactive A.I. so he will verbally command his suit to activate certain features (like a TASER web shot) when in combat.
  • The Cameo:
    • Giant-Man is seen on in Peter's video diary. War Machine, Black Panther and Black Widow are briefly glimpsed at as well.
    • Tony's house robot Dum-E helps to pack up Avengers Tower.
    • In one of Peter's science classes, there's an image gallery of famous scientists above the dry-erase board. Aside from the many historical figures, a photograph of Bruce Banner is also present.
    • A hallway mural at Peter's school also showcases several famous scientists, including Howard Stark and Abraham Erskine.
    • Stan Lee has yet another Creator Cameo as one of the apartment tenants who chastise Spider-Man for accidentally apprehending a man for breaking into his own car. He gets a second cameo, possibly unique in the Marvel films, when he appears in the animated credits after Spidey acidentally pulls the air conditioner out of his window.
    • Peter's gym class watches a Captain America fitness video, and later another video shows him talking about detention, followed by another video discussing puberty. Then there's the post-credits scene where he talks about how patience isn't always rewarded.
    • Pepper Potts shows up during a Stark press release.
    • Jim Morita is seen in a posthumous cameo, with his picture, medal, and dog tags displayed in the office of his Identical Grandson, Peter's high school principal.
  • Canon Character All Along: An odd case. Michelle Jones is revealed to have the nickname "MJ" in one of the last scenes of the movie, seemingly indicating she is this continuity's version of Mary Jane. Kevin Feige later on clarified she's not this series' version of ''Mary Jane'', but may fulfill the same role nonetheless.
  • Canon Foreigner:
    • Ned is an odd mixture between this and In Name Only — while originally based on Ned Leeds, his surname is never mentioned, and Word of God has admitted that he's basically just a Composite Character of various Spider-Man characters — primarily, in appearance and manner, Ganke from the Miles Morales comics.
    • Averted with a many, if not most, of the other students at Midtown and some of the school staff, who have the names of many other Marvel characters with links to Spider-Man or other heroes linked to him, with the level of similarity between them varying around.
    • A strange case with Michelle. Even though she is called "MJ" at the end of the movie, Word of God has stated that she is nonetheless her own character.
  • Captain Obvious: Peter finally admits to Liz that he has a crush on her. Her response? "I know. It was really obvious.".
  • Car Cushion: A horizontal variant — Shocker blasts Spider-Man into the side of a school bus.
  • Cardboard Box of Unemployment: Implied when Liz tells Peter that she and her mother are moving to Oregon. Her mother Doris Toomes can be seen in the background, carrying a banker's box with several books and a trophy in it. It's unclear if Mrs. Toomes worked at Midtown School of Science and Technology and has had to quit her job, or if she is helping Liz clean out her locker, but the impact of the scene is the same — the Toomes family members are persona non grata in New York City, and they're leaving to avoid the negative attention they'd receive during Adrian Toomes' trial.
  • Car Fu: Shocker blasts multiple buses back to fight Spider-Man.
  • Casting Gag:
  • Cat Scare: Of a sort. When Peter goes to Liz's house to pick her up for the homecoming dance, he discovers that Adrian Toomes is her father and the scene suddenly takes an unsettling turn as Peter waits for Liz in uncomfortable silence. Because of this, the sudden appearance of Liz's mother from the next room greeting Peter comes off as a bit jarring.
  • Cat Up a Tree:
    • In addition to Mr. Delmar, when the Vulture's guys rob the bank and accidentally destroy the bodega, Peter makes it a point to save Murphy, the bodega cat.
    • The Creative Closing Credits show Spidey reaching for a cat in a tree. It doesn't happens in the movie proper, although Spider-Man saves Mr. Delmar's cat from the wreckage of the shop along with its owner.
  • Ceiling Smash: The bank robbers suspends Spider-Man with an anti-gravity gun and slams him between the ceiling and floor a few times when he catches them robbing an ATM.
  • Celebrity Lie: Played with. When Ned blurts out that Peter is friends with Spider-Man, Flash assumes it's a spin on this trope and mockingly suggests that Peter bring him to Liz's party. He then brings up the related trope Girlfriend in Canada when Peter shows up out of costume.
    Flash Thompson: Penis Parker, what's up? Where's your pal Spider-Man? Let me guess: in Canada with your imaginary girlfriend?
  • Character Blog: A variation — Peter has a video diary of his exploits during Captain America: Civil War that he keeps for himself.
  • Chekhov's Boomerang: After disabling the Training Wheels Protocol in his suit, Peter immediately finds himself unfamiliar with the webshooter settings, and Karen mentions a refresher course. When he gets trapped in the warehouse, he does undertake that refresher course to familiarize himself with all his different web settings. This knowledge then helps him save the ferry just long enough for it to not have sunk already before Iron Man gets there].
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • The plane taking Peter to Berlin in the beginning is shown to be fully automated. So is the plane carrying the Avengers' gear in the climax, meaning Vulture can just hack the system instead of having to subdue a pilot and fly the thing himself.
    • When Peter is going to school early in the film, Flash Thompson is shown driving a nice car when he nearly runs over and then insults Peter. Peter ends up borrowing the car from Flash late in the film to go after Vulture, and ends up wrecking it in the process.
    • When Peter picks up his web shooter fluid from the little hiding spot under the school lockers, we can see that his first, DIY suit is also there. He later picks it up when he has to leave the homecoming dance to go after Toomes.
  • Civvie Spandex:
    • The Vulture wears a military-style bomber jacket under his wing suit, rather than a body suit like he does in the comics.
    • The Shocker has a military jacket and pants over a yellow suit instead of having a standard brown and yellow suit.
    • Peter's first costume was pretty clearly repurposed sweats◊. There are even tube socks involved! He ends up using this suit after Tony demands the one he made back.
  • Cliffhanger: The movie ends right as May discovers Peter wearing the Spider-Man suit. She's less than pleased.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The film uses the typical Orange/Blue Contrast common of modern films, which makes the characters look that much more striking when they show up in red (Spider-Man and Iron Man) or green (Vulture, particularly his Glowing Eyes of Doom). On the other hand, purple is the color of Chitauri technology, and it and anything made from it are vibrant purple.
  • Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames:
    • Averted in one instance. Brice calls himself "The Shocker", though Toomes is quick to note how silly that sounds.
      Toomes: What is this, pro wrestling?
    • After killing Brice by accident, Toomes hands Schultz the weapon and says "Here, you're the Shocker now."
    • Stark and Peter refer to Toomes as "flying vulture guy" but he is never called the Vulture (except in the note from Spider-Man when he leaves him tied up for the police).
    • Mason never goes by The Tinkerer.
    • Aaron Davis is a Played With example. He's only referred to by his real name in the film, but Karen's profile of him does mention "the Prowler" as an alternate alias.
    • Of course, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Ant-Man, and Spider-Man himself are all referred to by their code names.
    • The Hulkbuster armor actually got its codename back, being referred to as such by Happy during an inventory run-down, when it was previously only called "Veronica" back in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • Coming of Age Story: A movie about a teenager adjusting to the pressures of growing up... while also being a superhero.
  • Company Cross-References: Ned Leeds owns a LEGO set of the Death Star from Star Wars, which is also owned by Disney like Marvel is.
  • Composite Character:
    • Peter's best friend Ned has nothing in common with the original Ned Leeds from the comic outside of his first name and instead seems to be based on Ganke Lee, Miles Morales' best friend from Ultimate Spider-Man — Asian, nerdy, chubby, knows Spider-Man's secret identity and acts as his confidant, and is a big fan of LEGO. Word of God has even commented on this.
    • The Vulture takes some character traits from Green Goblin, as he is much more tech-oriented than normal, his winged exo-suit can be remote controlled and he is the father of Peter's classmate.
    • Betty Brant has the name, but looks more like Gwen Stacy.
  • Compromising Call: As Spider-Man is spying on the arms deal going on between Toomes' men and Aaron Davis, his cell-phone goes off causing Toomes' men to suspect some kind of double-cross. This forces Spider-Man to reveal himself to draw their attention (and guns) away from Davis.
  • Conflict Ball: It wasn't enough for the "Department of Damage Control" to take over the contract for the cleanup after "The Incident" from Toomes' salvage company (potentially bankrupting him in the process), some of them also had to be snide, unsympathetic and openly insulting while doing it, mocking him to his face for "overextending yourself." Realistically, he'd also be compensated for this, but apparently that doesn't happen, just to more decisively force him into villainy.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • When Toomes' crew is shown doing cleanup in the wake of The Avengers, they're in Grand Central Station working on the corpse of the Leviathan that Hulk and Thor brought down in that movie's Epic Tracking Shot.
    • Peter is shown watching the YouTube video of him catching a van before it hits a bus that Tony showed a snippet of back in Captain America: Civil War. In addition, that movie revealed that Peter was a dumpster diver salvaging "retro tech" and the PC he's watching the video on is cobbled together with spare parts and duct tape.
    • The first few minutes of the film is a minor recap of the events of Civil War from the perspective of Peter's video diary.
    • During his video diary, Peter says he doesn't recognize Black Panther, as Civil War took place before Wakanda opened up to the wider world in the Black Panther movie — and since T'Challa has not yet joined the ranks of the Avengers because he was a Wild Card only concerned with hunting Bucky down.
    • Also in the video diary, the first shot is of the Unisphere at Flushing Meadows park, which was a part of Tony's battle against the Hammer Drones in Iron Man 2.
    • Peter mentions that he hasn't gotten a chance to meet Thor or the Hulk yet, as they'd both left the team by the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
    • Tony Stark along with the Department of Defense own "Damage Control" an agency which provides clean-up to locations that have been devastated by fights between superhumans. This agency was acknowledged as far back as Iron Man as the team responsible for cleaning up after the destruction caused by Stark and Stane's fight with each other at the end of the movie.
    • Peter's gym class shows "Captain America's Fitness Challenge" training videos. He's wearing the costume that Coulson designed from The Avengers. Ned asks Peter if he knows the Captain as well and Peter brags that he stole Cap's shield. In addition, Peter's coach wonders why the school is still obliged to show the training video to their students, despite Captain America now being declared a war criminal.
    • While stuck in the Damage Control vault, Peter comes across what looks to be Ultron Prime's head.
    • A road sign that appears during the Decathlon team's trip to Washington D.C. indicates that the clean-up for the Triskelion is still underway. The Tinkerer also says as much during his conversation with Schultz.
    • Jackson Brice's (and later, Herman Schultz's) Shocker gauntlet is the same one Crossbones wore during the Lagos battle, scavenged and upgraded by Toomes' salvage company. There's even only one because only one was torn off during the fight, and the other was destroyed with Crossbones in his suicide explosion.
    • Principal Morita's office has a photo of Jim Morita, his grandfather from Captain America: The First Avenger.
    • Tony uses the telepresence features on his armor from Iron Man 3 as well as the lasers that were first introduced in Iron Man 2. Apparently they can do welding now.
    • The Mark 42 armor from Iron Man 3 is seen as one of the items being transported from Avengers Tower.
    • When Happy presents Tony with an engagement ring for Pepper, he claims he's been hanging onto it since 2008, the year the original Iron Man was released (canonically it took place two years later in 2010, at least until this film and Civil War introduced contradictory information).
    • One of the questions Ned asks Peter about his powers is whether Peter can summon and command an army of spiders. The answer is "no", obviously — although that does sound like one of the powers employed by another bug-themed superhero that Peter's met. There's also a reference to a time Spidey pretended he could actually summon and command spiders in the comics.
    • The jet carrying the last of Avengers Tower's belongings is outfitted with retro-reflective panels, something Harley Keener suggested to Tony during his journey through Tennessee.
    • One of the weapons mentioned being marketed by Toomes' gang are "black hole grenades", which the Dark Elves' grenades in Thor: The Dark World have been called. Either some had been salvaged in London and recreated by Tinkerer, or the name is coincidental.
  • Continuity Reboot: This film version of Spider-Man has no connection to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy or Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man Series; this iteration of Spider-Man instead made his MCU debut in Captain America: Civil War, and Homecoming is the official start of his new series of movies within the MCU's existing continuity.
  • Contrived Coincidence:
    • When Peter pulls the Disintegrator Ray weapon from the Vulture, it lands on the deck of the ferry and begins firing randomly while bouncing around. Peter webs it to the deck floor, and just happens to do so that the ray keeps firing on a perfectly vertical plane, corresponding exactly to the ferry's middle, and cleaves the ferry neatly in half.
    • In a place as big as Queens, the villain Spider-Man has been clashing with just happens to be the father of the girl Peter Parker has a crush on... which he discovers when he arrives to take her to the Homecoming Dance. Of course, this can be chalked as an example of the typical Spider-Man luck.
  • Cool Car: Flash's 2017 Audi TTS Roadster, which Peter borrows and drives like mad in a Car Chase.
  • Cosmic Plaything: Downplayed for a change. An aspect of Spider-Man lore is that his luck generally tends to lean toward the bad side. Fortunately in this movie, Peter is generally spared being the universe's Butt-Monkey beyond the self-imposed problems he encounters by trying to do too much too fast and the expected high-school angst given the creative team said it was patterned after a John Hughes movie. That said, there are still some examples of general bad luck in play:
    • In the TV news report about him stopping the ATM robbery, they show a file photo of "the Spider-Man" which is a shot of him emerging from a porta-potty with toilet paper stuck to his boot.
    • When Peter is having to run across the golf course to reach the location of the mysterious blue glow, he's about halfway across when the sprinklers turn on.
      Peter: This sucks!
    • In the two months he's been operating as the "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man", he's lost five backpacks (and presumably the clothes he stored inside).
  • Costume Evolution: Built into Peter's costume by Tony Stark. It's the same one Tony Stark made for him in Civil War, albeit with spider symbols that pop out a bit more. After removing the Training Wheels Protocol, Peter unlocks other features to the suit, such as underarm webbing for gliding. The new features all take Peter by complete surprise, contributing to the film's overall theme of not trying too much too fast.
  • Cracks in the Icy Façade: Tony is shown be a responsible, caring father figure to Peter Parker, constantly looking out for his well-being and giving him advice about how to be a hero. This stems from this poor relationship he had with his own father and his desire to be a better parent or mentor to him, showing that he is capable of caring about others and putting their needs before his.
  • Crazy-Prepared: Iron Man just happens to have a remote pod with dozens of small, powerful engine units that work perfectly to push two sides of a bisected ferryboat together.
  • Create Your Own Villain: Played with in that it wasn't Peter who created the Vulture, but "Damage Control", the joint venture of Stark Industries and the Department of Defense. This agency, established to handle the cleanup of superhero disasters, ended up taking over pre-existing civilian cleanup contracts but handled the transition without any real compensation or concern for those affected. Toomes' company had not only been working their site for awhile, but Toomes had also mortgaged his house to purchase (as opposed to rent) additional equipment and hire more workers to handle the Manhattan incident. Having the contract pulled out from under him without compensation left him not only threatened with bankruptcy but homelessness. This created the ironic case where the agency chartered with protecting the public from stray Chitauri tech ended up creating the situation it was intended to curtail, by driving Toomes to exploit and sell that tech to pull himself out of the bad situation they created for him.
  • Creator Cameo: Stan Lee, as per tradition, shows up. He's among a bunch of neighbors yelling at Peter for harassing a guy trying to break into his own car. He appears again in animated form during the credits, as Peter accidentally yanks his air conditioner out of the window with his webs.
  • Cringe Comedy: Some moments of awkward comedy happen, such as Peter discovering his date's father is the Vulture, and Happy interrupting his conversation with Peter in the bathroom after hearing a flush and having to wait for a student to wash his hands and leave. Also, references about "that time in your life when your body is going through all sorts of changes" from both Aunt May and Captain America.
  • Crucified Hero Shot: Spider-Man has a non-lethal variant when he holds an entire ship together with his webbing.
  • Curse Cut Short: Aunt May's reaction to seeing Peter in the Spider-Man suit. The interruption is caused by a Smash Cut to the credits sequence.note 
    Aunt May: What the fu—
  • Cute Machines: Spidey's new suit contains a small recon drone that forms his trademark symbol on his chest while not in use. It's essentially a flying robo-spider the size of a hand that "communicates" (read: confirms orders) with cute chirruping sounds.
  • Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Justified; as impressive as Phineas Manson's Chitauri-derived technology is, Toomes's gang can't sell them legally, since the basis for said technology was acquired illegally.
  • Dances and Balls: The eponymous high-school homecoming dance, naturally. Ironically, Peter leaves it immediately to pursue the Vulture.
  • Deadly Dodging: Subverted when Peter confronts Toomes in the warehouse. Toomes sends his flight suit toward Peter, who repeatedly dodges, causing it to smash into multiple concrete pillars. Turns out, Toomes had been aiming for the pillars, as taking them out drops the whole building on Peter.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Similar to the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, there are characters that rival Spidey as far as being snide and snippy, making it technically a World of Snark.
  • Death by Adaptation: There's a surprisingly small number of casualties by superhero movie standards — only one character dies — but Jackson Brice is killed by Toomes after trying to blackmail him. While the character did die in the comics, it was only decades after his first appearance.
  • Death by Secret Identity: Averted for Ned who promises to keep Peter's identity as Spider-Man a secret. Also averted with Toomes, who survives his fight with Spider-Man, and even keeps his identity secret while in prison.
  • Death from Above: The Vulture, who has a similar flying harness to Falcon, only bigger and scarier-looking.
  • Decomposite Character: There are multiple individuals armed with Shocker gear — the first being Jackson Brice and the second being Herman Schultz. Although this is downplayed due to the fact that Toomes accidentally incinerates Brice, and then he hands the surviving gauntlet over to Schultz personally.
    Toomes: Here, you're the Shocker now.
  • Decon-Recon Switch: Of teenage superheroes. Although the failings of his mentors certainly played a role in it as well, almost everything bad that happens in this movie can be traced back to one well-meaning but inexperienced superhero meddling in affairs way out of his league. Peter almost gets himself, his classmates and hundreds of bystanders killed several times: For example, he almost drowns while fighting the Vulture—after causing untold amounts of damage on his way to catch his goons, puts the Washington Monument and everyone inside in danger by leaving a dangerous piece of alien technology with his friend and causes the Ferry incident by acting before the proper authorities get a chance to. It's only due to the repeated interventions of actual heroes that he survives. However, by the end of the film he's able to prove his worth by stopping the Vulture from making off with the Avengers' tech without any help (even using his original Beta Outfit to get the job done) and the adults realize he does have what it takes to be one of the Avengers. Peter declines because he realizes that the regular people need a superhero too and he can fill out that niche while the other heroes can't.
  • Deconstruction
    • Peter is a super eager Ascended Fanboy used to dealing with occasional crooks and petty crimes, and his intervention in Civil War involved fighting professional superheroes not aiming to kill and pulling their punches. When he dives head-first into fighting an arms dealing group armed with some serious alien tech who know how to get the drop on someone with full intent to kill, he gets bashed and thrashed around due to sheer inexperience, usually only winning by sheer luck and interventions. Tony Stark may go about it the wrong way but earnestly has a point that Peter really needs more experience as a hero first before he really tries to go big.
    • The same happens with taking the "training wheels protocol" off of his suit, suddenly having access to hundreds of functions without any context to how any of them work whatsoever, which causes him no small amount of trouble. Even when he takes a refresher course at "Karen"'s A.I. suggestion, Peter only gets half an hour of testing in to learn a handful of tricks he uses afterwards before he loses the suit, and while they come in handy, he only produces very short-term results and middling success with them.
  • Deconstructed Trope: Since Peter is the rare figure who has a Secret Identity in the MCU, we see the consequences of trying to live with a secret identity, especially for a young kid living with his guardian. His constant lies and excuses, skipping classes, and ignoring his aunt, makes her worried sick and leads to the school putting him in detention, while also earning him scorn among his fellow students since he bails on them during an important competition.
  • Deducing the Secret Identity: When Peter is riding with Liz and Adrian Toomes to the school dance, Toomes pieces together that Peter is Spider-Man when Liz talks about how he keeps disappearing, both at her party and at Washington DC.
  • Dented Iron: Both Vulture and Spider-Man are far tougher than your average fighter, the former thanks to his fancy high-tech suit and the latter because he got bitten by a magic spider. Nevertheless, after the plane crash at the end of the climax, they're both on their last legs. Peter is having trouble staying on his feet and his Super-Senses have been overwhelmed. Vulture's flight suit is badly damaged and sparking, and even explodes when he tries to take off with a crate of stolen weapons tech.
  • Description Cut: Twice during Spider-Man's climb up the Washington Monument, as the tour guide inside the doomed elevator assures everyone that things are alright, it is followed by Karen giving an accurate and ominous appraisal of the situation.
  • Destroy the Product Placement: Audi is one of the film's sponsors and Flash is seen driving one throughout the film. During the climax, Spider-Man "borrows" it so he can get to Vulture's hideout and severely damages it because he's not an experienced driver.
  • Destructive Saviour: Well, Spider-Man is training to be an Avenger after all, whose adventures involved much collateral damage and battle wear and tear, and led to a specific government organization dedicated to cleaning up their messes. The chase through the lawn has Peter stumble across the neighborhood, bouncing on low-ceiling buildings, causing general nuisance, breaking a treehouse and so on. Keeping the Chitauri grenade creates the Washington Monument incident which ends up defacing it. His chasing of the Vulture to the Staten Island Ferry tore the entire ship in half. Even when he does finally manages to defeat the Vulture, he can't do it without destroying Tony Stark's fancy invisible plane and part of Coney Island. Tony Stark actually does Lampshade this when he audibly sighs that Peter is turning into another typically neurotic and screwy Avenger:
    Peter Parker: I was just trying to be like you.
    Tony Stark: I wanted you to be better.
  • Determinator: Peter and Karen take two hundred and forty seven attempts to break the time lock on the DODC depot.
  • Deus Exit Machina: Iron Man alone could have probably taken out Toomes whole operation. But Tony Stark sees what Peter is trying to do as "below the pay grade" of the Avengers.
  • Did Not Get the Girl: After the final battle, Liz is understandably upset when she finds out that her father is a criminal. Not only that, her mother has also decided that they should move away. She's also upset with Peter for running from the dance, unaware that he was trying to stop the Vulture, so he doesn't get together with her after all.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Tony recruited Spider-Man in the previous film to help fill out his ranks during the airport battle without any real plan or intention for Spider-Man to eventually join the Avengers. Tony didn't realize that he was enabling unrealistic expectations that he really didn't know how to deliver since he wasn't entirely on board with recruiting a Child Soldier. Tony also doesn't immediately give Peter a hard no, or provide clear ground rules, such as telling him that Spider-Man won't join the Avengers until after he completes his education and becomes an adult (as he obviously implies to him) which Ultimate Nick Fury did do in the same situation. He does this because he likes Peter and Tony still thinks he'll be content being a "friendly neighborhood Spider-man". The end result is that Peter starts neglecting his high school life and openly goes out seeking trouble as an audition for the big leagues, forcing Iron-Man to take a much harsher and honest tone with him, which also upsets their bond.
  • Disappointed in You: Tony was hoping Peter would be a better superhero than himself and thus is disappointed at Peter acting reckless, causing property damage, and endangering civilians. Everyone else thought he was crazy for sticking up for a kid and then the Ferry incident happens...
  • Disintegrator Ray: One of the weapons put together with alien tech by the Tinkerer is a disintegrator rifle, which Toomes first uses on Brice, turning him into ashes (although he thought that was an anti-gravity gun). The Vulture is later armed with it on the ferry, which results in an accidental discharge during the fight against Spider-Man, cleaving the boat cleanly in half through the middle.
  • Distant Prologue: The very first scene in the movie is set right after the end of The Avengers, in which we see Adrian Toomes and his group of blue-collar workers running a cleanup crew business in New York, with their work cut out for them. Then he's immediately told that an Executive Order has mandated that the government agency "Damage Control" handle the job instead, putting him and his employees out of work. This drives Toomes' Face–Heel Turn to become the Vulture.
  • Do-Anything Robot: Not so much a robot, but the Stark-created Spider-Man suit is packed with more gadgets and options than anything shown in Stark's own Powered Armor. When Peter removes the "training wheels protocol" he finds out the suit had its own AI he eventually calls Karen, and that is when all the tricks and gadgets of the suit come into play. It was hinted at earlier with a parachute, heating coils and tracking device so Tony can follow him, but along with Karen he gets an internal HUD, learns he has over 500 possible webshooter configurations (including impact, grenade and taser), deployable wingsuit wings, deployable recon drone and lastly an "Enhanced Combat Mode" with an "Instant Kill" feature that Peter doesn't want to mess with.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Tony has a distant mentor relationship with Peter, much like his relationship with his own father. Then the subtlety goes out the window when Tony straight-up says he's trying to be a better mentor than his dad. When he gets angry at Peter for the ferry incident, he stops to note that he sounds like his father.
    Tony: This is where you zip it! The adult is talking!
  • Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do: Tony Stark explains to Peter Parker how an Avenger should behave, which is basically not emulating Tony's behavior and minding some of the things he avoids doing (out of personal experience and common sense).
    Tony: Don't do anything I would do.
    [Peter nods]
    Tony: And definitely don't do anything I wouldn't do.
    [Peter looks confused]
    Tony: There's a little grey area in there, and that's where you operate. Alright?
  • Don't Make Me Destroy You: Toomes' beef isn't with Peter himself and he has no real desire to harm him. However, he makes it very clear to Peter that if he tries to get in the way of his goals, he will kill him and his loved ones.
  • Double-Meaning Title: Actually has several meanings. Primarily Homecoming references Spider-Man being a teenager in high school and the dance in question that serves as the crux of the plot. It also references that the story takes place shortly after Peter's "homecoming" from his trip abroad to fight in Civil War. It also can refer to Peter's decision to not join the Avengers, but return to Queens to be a street-level hero for the time being. Finally from a meta standpoint it can refer to the character finally returning to Marvel and joining the MCU after years of appearing in separate film continuities.
  • Dramatic Drop: A stunned Ned drops a large and complex LEGO Death Star when he discovers Peter is Spider-Man, causing it to shatter into its component pieces.
  • Dramatic Unmask:
    • An comedic example. Peter unmasks as he crawls back into his room, thinking he's alone... and then it turns out that his best friend, Ned, was watching him all along, jaw on the floor.
    • Another comedic example happens at the end of the film, albeit one with greater implications on the plot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward. After Peter gets the Stark-made Spider-Man suit back, he takes off the mask with satisfaction... And the camera pans over to reveal Aunt May standing in his bedroom door. Cue Curse Cut Short and smash cut to credits.
  • Drives Like Crazy: Spider-Man hijacks Flash's car. He admits that the most experience he has is learning in parking lots. He's never driven on the road, let alone high speeds. He tries his best to keep the car from getting totaled.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?:
    • Peter gets tired of being treated as a kid by Stark and tries to prove himself by taking on the Vulture. The first time he does it, it doesn't go well. Tony tries to "break the cycle of shame" by giving Peter praise when he does good such as saving his classmates at the Washington Monument and then defeating the Vulture.
    • Happy later genuinely thanks him for saving his job when he fights the Vulture and prevents him from stealing Avengers technology.
  • Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help: Tony Stark's reluctance to bring Peter into the big world of superheroes and Happy's role as a glorified nanny basically leave Spider-Man with little to do but stop petty crimes and offer assistance wherever he thinks it's needed. At one point this goes as far as stopping to give an old lady directions. Fittingly, even though he is somewhat bored, Peter doesn't seem to mind all that much. He really is the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: Unusually for Marvel Studios (which usually have their "headliner" characters appear in standalones before crossing over into other movies), Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Aunt May did not make their first appearances in this film, but in Captain America: Civil Warnote  instead. The film also has one for Avengers: Infinity War towards the end, as Spider-Man's "Avenger" suit is unveiled by Tony.
  • Easily-Distracted Referee: Tony tasks Happy with watching over Peter... and managing security at Stark Tech... and managing the move out of Stark Tower. Happy tries to keep track of Peter, but he's handling so many things that he misses the fact that Peter is in over his head dealing with the Vulture.
  • Edgy Backwards Chair-Sitting: Captain America does this at the beginning of a school PSA. Given that the video is meant for detention students, it comes across as him trying too hard to be Totally Radical.
  • Elevator Failure: The kids on the Academic Decathlon team are rescued from a damaged elevator at the Washington Monument.
  • Embarrassing Cover Up: During the homecoming dance, Ned heads off to the library to go on the laptops in order to help Peter locate Adrian. When a teacher chaperoning the dance comes by and asks what he's doing, Ned blurts out the only thing he can awkwardly come up with.
    Ned: I'm... looking... at porn.
  • Epic Fail: Peter's attempt at interrogating Aaron Davis only embarrasses him so thoroughly that Aaron says, "You gotta get better at this part of the job."
  • Establishing Character Moment: Jackson Brice nonchalantly shows up late to work in the opening scene and blows off Toomes' berating of him for it, showing off an indifferent attitude toward Toomes and his job that gets more pronounced as the film goes on and ultimately leads to his (accidental) death at the hands of the latter.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
    • The Vulture says that he would do anything to protect his family. He is also very devoted to taking care of his employees. In addition, he decides to initially give Peter a chance to walk away from pursuing him instead of just killing him outright since Peter saved Liz in Washington DC.
    • Aaron Davis may be a crook, but he has family in Queens and doesn't want Toomes' alien weapons loose in the neighborhood.
  • Event Title: The "Homecoming" refers to the actual high-school homecoming and Peter deciding to stay in New York instead of joining the Avengers.
  • Everybody Knew Already: When Peter finally tells Liz about his feelings for her, she tells him she's known for a while. He didn't exactly do a good job of hiding them. Thankfully, it's mutual.
  • Everybody Lives: Apart from one minor character who gets killed by accident, there are no on-screen deaths in the entire film despite the MCU being generally willing to kill even large amounts of named characters and entire armies of mooks in any movie. Spider-Man even goes out of his way to save the villain.
  • Evil Counterpart: Toomes to Stark. Both built their armor from scrap metal, both fight tooth and nail to protect their interests. However, while Stark does what he does to protect the people and be accountable, Toomes is looking out for the little guys, his family and his employees, who due to Stark's takeover of the cleanup operation has left them out of a job. Ergo, both find new jobs, Stark as a peacekeeper and heroic figure in the public eye, and Toomes as a villainous scavenger selling high tech gear to make ends meet operating from the shadows of anonymity. In terms of visuals, both Stark and Toomes have close-up shots from within their respective helmets.
  • Evil Virtues:
    • Toomes is motivated by them, especially love towards his family and loyalty towards his crew. He also keeps Peter's identity a secret while in prison, likely out of gratitude for saving his and his daughter's life. He also might see Peter as, unlike Tony, someone concerned with the "little guys" like him.
    • Aaron Davis is grateful to Peter for risking his own life to save his, so he tells him where to find Toomes' gang.
  • Exactly What I Aimed At: When Toomes attacks Spider-Man with his flying rig, Spider-Man evades the rig easily. He isn't aiming for Spider-Man, he is aiming for the load-bearing pillars in the warehouse, causing the warehouse to collapse and bury Spider-Man in the rubble.
    Toomes: I'm sorry, Peter.
    Peter: What are you talking about? That thing hasn't even touched me yet!
    Toomes: True. But then again... it wasn't really trying to.
  • Exact Words:
    • When Tony offers Peter membership in the Avengers, he holds to his promise of taking away the first Spider-suit "forever" by having created a brand new "Iron Spider" suit for Peter's role in the Avengers. When Peter decisively turns him down, Stark is surprised but impressed by Peter's maturity and rescinds his earlier decision by letting Peter have the first suit back so he can be an effective hero "for the little guy".
    • Meta-example. Zendaya stated in multiple interviews that she does not play Mary Jane Watson. Her character's name is Michelle. She does also go by MJ.
  • Expressive Mask: Like in Civil War, Spider-Man's eye lenses shrink, grow, and contort based on his expression underneath the mask. The premise is that his Super-Senses can be overwhelming at times and to function as Spider-Man he needs some sort of limiter. He was using standard goggles in his original costume and the newer lenses intuitively adjust according to the situation. Amusingly, he accidentally drops into some girls having a backyard camping party and the lenses malfunction, with spastic eye movement resembling a horror movie.
  • Expy: Ned is heavily based on Ganke Lee from the Miles Morales leg of the Ultimate Spider-Man continuity.

    Tropes F to J 
  • Failed Attempt at Drama:
    • Peter's attempt at using his suit's interrogation features (with its vocal modulator) fails miserably because Aaron Davis had encountered him earlier in the film and knows what Peter actually sounds like.
    • Happy Hogan starts to give Peter a heartwarming speech (in the boys' bathroom at the school) about how much it meant to him that Peter stopped the theft of the shipment from Stark Tower... but is forced to stop and just stand there awkwardly as another student flushes a toilet, comes out of a stall, washes his hands, dries his hands, and leaves.
  • Failed a Spot Check:
    • Spider-Man sneaks into his bedroom by the window, clinging to the ceiling, taking off his mask and closing the door before going down... and only then does he notices Ned sitting on the bed. Sure it's a bunk bed, the top of which having blocked Peter's line of sight from the window, but still, so much for super-senses.note 
    • When Aunt May walks in on Peter and Ned after Peter has shed his spider-suit, she doesn't notice it even though it's lying on the middle of the floor between him and her. A Downplayed example in that her focus is on talking to Peter and Ned about the ruined dinner and Peter's room is rather cluttered and messy.
    • He does it again by the end when he finds a bag with the Stark-made uniform. After he puts it on, he realizes Aunt May is by the door.
    • The Damage Control trucks have a whole lot of fancy gizmos, but neither they nor the agents on them appear to notice Spider-Man and Vulture tussling on top. Or Spidey inside.
  • Failure Hero: Peter spends most of the movie trying and failing to prove himself as a hero, getting in over his head with villains beyond his abilities and creating more problems than he solves. He nearly gets all of his friends killed by mishandling a dangerous Chitauri weapon in Washington, and causes the destruction of the Staten Island ferry by trying to handle Vulture on his own, after which he is rescued and harshly reprimanded by Tony. Even in the climax, he loses his Final Battle with the Vulture, and only proves his worth by saving the latter's life after his suit malfunctions and nearly kills him.
  • Famous, Famous, Fictional:
    • The pictures of scientists at Peter's school include Bruce Banner, Howard Stark, and Abraham Erskine among several real ones.
    • As Liz is quizzing the team, Peter answers one question with "Strontium, Barium, Vibranium."
  • Fanservice: We get an extended sequence of Peter stripping off his clothes to change into his spider suit. Kinda creepy, given he's underage.
  • Fantastic Aesop: "If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it" which comes in the final act, falls somewhere between Magic and Powers and Never Be a Hero in terms of its intended message and plot function. Peter Parker and Spider-Man already has superpowers to start with. So he is already something without his suit and not a Badass Normal the way Tony Stark is, and as such if he has anything to prove it's mostly on the extent that he's still a great hero with middling XP and some of his gear nerfed in a boss-fight against a Villainous Underdog.
  • Fat Best Friend: Ned is a heavy-set, jovial and friendly comrade for Peter.
  • File Photo Gag: In the TV news report about Spider-Man stopping the ATM robbery, they show a file photo of "the Spider-Man" which is a shot of him emerging from a porta potty with toilet paper stuck to his boot.
  • Final Battle: A two-part battle. Peter interrupts Adrian's heist of the cargo plane containing the contents of Avengers Tower, leading to a fight that damages the plane and makes it crash. Then, they fight among the flames of the wreckage.
  • First-Name Basis: Peter never calls May "Aunt", only ever using her first name.
  • Flipping the Bird: Michelle greets Peter at the homecoming dance with a spirited middle finger up high.
  • Floating Head Syndrome: Most MCU movies have one, but taken to the extreme with the one for this film, and mocked extensively for it. Notice that nine characters are on the poster, but technically only six people. Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Keaton can be seen in addition to their alter egos of Spider-Man, Iron Man and The Vulture.
  • Foregone Conclusion: Peter and Tony are guaranteed to survive the movie, seeing as how both are set to appear in Avengers: Infinity War.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • The opening scene establishes that Brice is habitually late, hinting at the disrespectful attitude towards his boss that he shows later.
    • One of the first things we see about the Vulture is his admiring his daughter's drawing of the Avengers in New York, to which the Tinkerer comments, "kid's got a future." Liz Allen is shown to be organizing the homecoming committee and hanging up several beautifully drawn posters for the dance, confirming that she's just as successful as the Tinkerer predicted.
    • When Herman shows up at Peter's school searching for the weapon Peter stole, he comments on their location and what Toomes might say if he knew they were there. No doubt Toomes would be upset if they endangered his daughter in any way.
    • When Toomes sees news footage of the academic club from Peter's school being saved by Spider-Man, he stops what he's doing to seriously focus on the report. The Reveal, of course, is that he is the father of one of the students Spider-Man saved.
    • It's mentioned several times that Toomes has a kid. Naturally, it's Liz.
    • Liz Allen lives in an extremely posh Big Fancy House, which was presumably paid for with the money from all of the technology her father stole and resold.
    • Throughout the movie, Tony drops hints that he's been paying attention to Happy Hogan's status reports such as referencing the lady with the churro or pointing out he knows that Peter had quit band class. This explains why Tony is offended when Peter accuses him of not caring during their later argument.
    • When finally meeting Peter for the first time, Toomes shakes hands and notices Peter's "grip". The first of many details that Toomes takes in and then figures out for himself that Peter is Spider-Man.
  • Forgotten Fallen Friend: Despite this being a Spider-Man movie, Uncle Ben is barely mentioned and how he died in this incarnation is unknown.
  • Form-Fitting Wardrobe: The Stark-designed Spider-Man suit is designed with a vacuform-like feature, letting Peter put on a slightly baggy costume before cinching up snug to his body. Taking off the suit is a similar process.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: While most previous MCU movies are about adults learning to be superheroes, Homecoming is heavily influenced by high-school coming-of-age movies like The Breakfast Club and begins with already-superpowered Peter learning to be a better hero.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Friendship Moment: One of the items they still need to load on the plane is "a prototype for Cap's new shield". Even after the events of Civil War, Tony's looking out for his best friend.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: Adrian Toomes was just the blue-collar boss of a salvage crew, who was hired to clean up after the Chitauri invasion of New York. When his contract was unceremoniously terminated, threatening his livelihood, he uses the items he's already salvaged to build weapons, becoming a prominent and wealthy arms dealer. Then he starts stealing even more advanced technology to keep the business going and even ends up stealing a plane loaded with relics from the Avengers' past battles.
  • Fully Absorbed Finale: While this is a Spider-Man movie, certain scenes in the movie help give Tony Stark some much-needed closure and completion of the character arc he went through in his movies. Especially in regards to a Will They or Won't They? moment with Pepper.
  • Funny Background Event:
    • When Peter is in the alley changing into the Spider-Man suit, he kicks over a garbage can while taking off his pants. Two rats can be seen scurrying away behind him.
    • When Spider-Man first enters the bank to stop the ATM robbery and quips about them forgetting their PIN number, behind him is a poster saying "Identity Theft? We have you covered." It immediately cuts to a wide shot of the startled thieves, all wearing Avengers Halloween masks.
    • The gym teacher is clearly indifferent toward the "Captain America Fitness Challenge" videos and demonstrates his lack of preparation. At one point, Captain America says, "Today, my good friend, your gym teacher..." as he gestures to the left side of the video screen. The coach, standing on the right side, gives a staged smile and wave to the students.
    • In the school gym while the other students are doing sit-ups in pairs of two, Michelle is just lying on her back by herself repeatedly raising and lowering the book she's reading.
  • Fun T-Shirt: Peter wears a few of these throughout the film, including one based upon this geeky meme◊.
  • Future Copter: The Vulture's flying suit also has VTOL rotors besides the wings.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: Aside from Peter Parker and Tony Stark, who are already established in the MCU, the Tinkerer qualifies. Despite being starting out working for an ordinary salvage crew, he's smart enough to integrate alien and human technology to build super-advanced weaponry.
  • Gang of Hats: The group of criminals robbing an ATM all wear plastic masks of the Avengers.
  • Gender Flip: Peter's science teacher is Ms. Warren, a reference to the male Professor Warren in the comics.
  • Gilligan Cut: Flash initially stutters to Spider-Man that he can't hand his dad's car over to him. Cut to Spider-Man driving away from a sad-faced Flash and his date.
  • Glowing Eyes of Doom:
    • The villainous Vulture's mask features glowing green circles in its high-tech goggles.
    • The Spider-Suit's "Instant Kill" feature makes the lenses of the mask shrink, leaving only small glowing red dots for eyes.
  • Gone Horribly Right: Tony recruited Peter into an Avengers level adventure then dicked off because he wanted to recover his relationship with Pepper and he left Happy in charge of dealing with everything else, including dealing with relocating everything related to the Avengers to the new upstate compound, which included a teenaged superhero. Of course everything went off the rails. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong: Tony leaving Peter in Happy's care means Peter, desperate to prove himself, finds himself in the crosshairs of the Vulture. So much worse, Peter's new Tony-designed suit, has a parachute, which fires at the worst moment and almost drowns Peter when the Vulture drops him in the Hudson Bay.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Peter is Always Someone Better to Flash, academically, so Flash bullies Peter socially.
  • Gross Gum Gag: During his fight against Shocker II, Peter gets punched into a bus and notices some gums stuck under the seats, grossing him out.
    Peter: Ugh. Gross.
  • Hammerspace: The real breakthrough of Stark technology is the incredible amount of hardware it can cram into a spandex-like suit — just like in the Iron Man suits, in fact. Not only does the Spider-Man suit has a full functional A.I. integrated in it, but also dozens of webbing options, as well as yards and yards of the stuff concentrated in small cartridges. Not to mention a full parachute stacked in the symbol on his back. Peter also retrieves his rather chunky cell phone from behind his back. Does that suit have pockets?
  • Handshake Substitute: Peter and Ned have a very elaborated and extended one to show how tight they are.
  • Handy Feet:
    • Having feet that can grip things gives you an extra set of hands in combat. At one point during the ATM fight, Peter grips the "Thor" robber with his feet and uses them to throw the robber into the wall.
    • When Spider-Man is attempting to get Liz out of the wrecked Washington Monument elevator, the section of the roof his feet are planted against suddenly gives way. Spider-Man quickly shifts so that his feet now grasp his web-line and both of his hands are free to rescue Liz.
  • Happy Ending Override: Inverted. Pepper's appearance at the end, involving Happy passing Tony an engagement ring he'd been keeping since 2008, implies that Pepper and Tony are back together or at least reconciling, after it was mentioned in Civil War that they broke up due to Tony's broken promises and his obsession with heroics.
  • Hard Work Hardly Works: Averted with both Peter and Shocker 2. Shocker 2 is shown practicing with his gauntlet and learning how to best use it effectively, and the fact that Peter didn't take the time to learn about his suit's capabilities causes him a lot of trouble.
  • Helping Granny Cross the Street: Spidey gives an old woman directions at one point and she thanks him by buying him a churro.
  • Hero Stole My Bike: In order to get to the Vulture's hideout in time, Spider-Man commandeers Flash's car (actually his father's car) while he's driving his date to the Homecoming party. We can only imagine how much grief Flash later gets from his dad after Peter flips the car on its right side so it slides along the ground for 100 feet before stopping.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity: Generally Inverted. In this story, the news media is not out to get Spider-Man (though we don't see anything Daily Bugle-related) and often praises his heroism. He also gets shout-outs from civilians that see him swinging bynote . But he does have to evade the cops during his time in Washington DC, as climbing national monuments without permission is technically a federal crime, and being an unregistered superhero is an international crime. In addition, Spidey's unique flavor of poor luck still holds as we see a snippet of the news report about him stopping the ATM robbery and the best file photo they have is a shot of him emerging from a porta-potty with toilet paper stuck to his boot.
  • High-Altitude Battle: The Vulture's big thing is being able to fly, so naturally some fights with the hero happen in the sky. The first half of the Final Battle is Spider-Man vs. the Vulture on a jet high in the air.
  • High-School Dance: The homecoming dance is an important part of the film's plot.
  • Hollywood Hacking:
    • Peter and Ned are able to access and bypass whatever encryption and security protocols Stark put on the Spider-Man suit as well as deactivate the "training wheels" protocol.
    • Peter is able to open the DODC warehouse door by brute-forcing the entry of the access code with his graphing calculator and the help of his suit's A.I.
  • Hollywood Law: The inciting incident where the Federal Government takes over the salvage operations from a local contractor would not typically result in the ruination of the local contractor. Early termination is a standard part of contracts that specifies who owes whom what in the event one party or another wishes to terminate the contract. In this case the Feds would force the City to terminate their salvage operations, activating the early termination clauses with the contractors. This is typically a large payout that covers the cost of purchasing or leasing equipment and hiring employees (two items that Adrian Toomes explicitly mentions). Operating without protection from early termination is incredibly risky and unlikely to be undertaken by any sort of established businessman. In fact, Damage Control voiding Adrian Toomes' legal city contract without compensating him is highly illegal. In any situation like this, the government has a duty to compensate businesses for what is essentially seizure of eminent domain, and given the stakes involved, a salvage company operating on a city contract in New York City (the most contested real-estate market in the world), Toomes had more than enough to sue for a big fat check from the government.
  • Hourglass Plot: During the film, Peter wants to prove himself to Tony Stark and become an Avenger, while Tony wants Peter out of harm's way and to stick to the streets. By the end Tony has decided that Peter has proven himself and wants to make him an official member of the team. However, Peter decides that he'd rather stay a street-level hero and fight for the little guy and turns the offer down.
  • How Do I Shot Web?:
    • Peter naturally has no idea how to use all of the subsystems and features included in the Stark suit (including, appropriately enough, countless different webshooter settings) when he has Ned unlock it, as the features are included under the assumption that Peter has undergone training on how to use them when unlocked. He eventually takes Karen up on her offer of running a refresher course.
    • While Peter is struggling to get a grip on his suit's newly unlocked web settings at the abandoned gas station, the Vulture's goons in the truck are having a similar struggle with their weapons' settings.
  • Hypocrisy Nod: While advising Peter about being a superhero, Tony Stark tells him "don't do anything I would do." Later after the Ferry Incident, he tells Peter that he wanted him to be better.
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    • At the bodega, the guy at the counter asks how Aunt May is doing then talks about how hot she is in Spanish, smiling. When Peter, also in Spanish, asks about the guy's daughter, he loses his grin and tries to charge Peter double for his sandwich.
    • When Peter finds out his suit has many of its abilities locked down under the "Training Wheels Protocol", Peter wishes that Tony would stop treating him like a kid. Or rather, whining about it while jumping on his bed. Even Ned points out that Peter is still a kid.
    • When Happy calls Peter to check in on him after he notices that Peter is leaving New York, Peter complains about Happy putting surveillance on him and violating his privacy, while Ned points out that Peter is doing the very same thing by tracking Adrian's goons to their destination.
    • Liz and her friends are playing "Fuck, Marry, Kill" focusing on the Avengers. When one of them brings up Spider-Man, another uncomfortably retorts that he might be in his thirties already. The three Avengers they mentioned, Thor, Iron Man and Hulk, are way older than thirty. Thor is basically a god who has lived for around thousands of yearsnote , while both Iron Man and Hulk are clearly over forty.
    • In The Stinger, Captain America is extolling the virtues of patience... just before asking "How many more of these?", showing he's running out of patience for those corny PSA videos.
    • In the PSA playing in the detention class, Captain America solemnly informs the students in detention that the only way to be truly cool is to follow the rules. This, from a man who consistently kept breaking the rules he felt were unjust or shouldn't constrain him, to the point where he ended up exiled from America as a "war criminal". Mixed messages, much?
  • I Call It "Vera": Peter starts off calling his suit's A.I. "Suit Lady" but decides that's weird and eventually settles on calling it "Karen". He's not as creative with his reconnaissance drone, however, simply dubbing it "Droney".
  • Identical Grandson: Principal Morita is the grandson of Jim Morita — who was seen in Captain America: The First Avenger and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — and he looks just like his grandfather did.
  • I Did What I Had to Do: When Peter confronts Toomes after they figure out each others' identities, Toomes tries to talk Peter down by telling him that he just does what he does to provide for his family and they depend on him bringing in income to survive. Peter retorts that it doesn't matter. Selling illegal weapons to criminals is still wrong.
  • If I Wanted You Dead...:
    • Downplayed; while not wanting Peter dead, Stark tells him that Cap could've easily taken him out during the airport battle in Civil War if he wanted to.
    • When Mac Gargan confronts Toomes in the first stinger, Toomes uses the trope as a way to deny knowing who Spider-Man really is. That is to say, if Toomes knew Spider-Man's true identity, then he would have already killed the hero, and Mac Gargan wouldn't need to ask him about it.
  • I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Toomes disintegrates Brice due to mistaking a disintegrator for an anti-gravity gun. Common sense says that you don't grab a weapon for use unless you're absolutely certain of what it does.
  • I Just Want to Be Special: This is Peter's problem with Tony: Peter wants to be seen as an Avenger-level super hero, but Tony feels Peter needs mentoring and training for a while. This can be seen as Peter and Ned hack into the Spider-suit and discover there are numerous other subsystems and abilities, but they're locked under the "Training Wheels Protocol".
  • I'm Okay!: During one web-swinging routine in New York, Spider-Man misses a shot (showing he's still somewhat inexperienced) and painfully lands on his face on the roof of a building, before sliding for a few meters. He's quickly back to his feet while calling out "I'm okay! I'm okay!" to nobody in particular.
  • Implausible Deniability: Upon Ned's discovery of his secret, Peter denies being Spider-Man, despite Ned having witnessed him crawling on the ceiling, wearing the costume but maskless.
    Ned: You're the Spider-Man! From YouTube!
    Peter: [taking the costume off] No, I'm not, I'm not! This is, this is...
    Ned: You were on the ceiling!
  • Imported Alien Phlebotinum: The tech that the Tinkerer produces for the Vulture incorporates leftover Chitauri tech from the Incident.
  • Inconvenient Parachute Deployment: When Spidey is dropped from high in the sky by the Vulture, his suit automatically triggers its emergency parachute. Unfortunately for him, he's facing upward with his back pointing towards the ground, meaning the parachute pops out from underneath him. Unable to catch air, it immediately envelops him, causing him nearly to drown when he crashes in a lake but can't swim up to the surface through the chute. Also, he forgets to have it reinstalled, resulting in a later mission involving heights putting him in danger of a fatal fall.
  • Inherently Funny Word: May and Peter's dinner at a Thai place is interrupted by her constantly asking if he's satisfied with the larb. They then swap puns about it back and forth.
  • In Name Only:
    • Outside of his name and antagonism towards Peter, Flash Thompson has almost nothing in common with his comic book counterpart, who is usually a blond-haired Caucasian, athletic star football player that was never smart enough to be considered Peter's equal intellectually and had the tendency of bullying Peter both physically and verbally. Here, Flash is portrayed as a Latino who is an academic rival of Peter who does not have any physical skills. However, the film makes a reference to his comic book counterpart through both portraying Flash as the most athletic student in gym except for Peter, rapidly completing a rope climb, and showing that while he's on the academic decathlon team, he is an alternate, not first-string, he gets a lot of on-screen questions wrong, and he didn't answer anything during the championship.
    • As he is a Composite Character, Ned has nothing in common with the original Ned Leeds from the comics outside of his name. Comic Ned was originally portrayed as a Caucasian reporter with a slender built that worked for the Daily Bugle. He was also initially Peter's rival for the love of Betty Brant, and had never attended the same high school as Peter due to being an adult that was older than him through a few years, nor has he ever discovered Spider-Man's secret identity. Here, Movie Ned is portrayed as a fat Asian student who attends the same high school as Peter in addition to being his best friend and the second person to discover his secret identity. This makes him far more similar to Miles Morales' Muggle Best Friend Ganke Lee than to Comic Ned.
    • Michelle reveals in the last minutes of the film that she's known as MJ by her friends. While there was a lot of early speculation that Zendaya was playing Mary Jane, Michelle Jones is so far removed from the comic book Mary Jane that this still comes as a surprise.
    • Betty Brant is generally portrayed both in the comics and in previous adaptations as J. Jonah's Jameson's secretary at the Daily Bugle, whereas in this movie she's seen as one of Peter's classmates.
  • The Internet Is for Porn: Ned's excuse for why he was in the library helping Peter instead of at the homecoming dance is that he was looking at porn.
  • I Owe You My Life:
    • Played with; Toomes is willing to offer Peter a Last Chance to Quit because he saved his daughter Liz's life at the Washington Monument.
    • Also the likely reason why Toomes denies knowing Spider-Man's secret identity to Mac Gargan, since Peter saved his life when his wingsuit exploded at the end of their battle.
  • Irony:
    • In Civil War, Peter was hesitant about flying to Germany due to having homework, and Tony charismatically pressures him into going. In this film, Peter is now eager to join the Avengers, but Tony is hesitant about bringing him back into that world.
    • Peter jumps down onto the van with Shocker I and Shocker II shouting "Surprise!" just as the Vulture swoops down and grabs him.
  • It's Always Spring: Peter swings through the suburbs at one point, crashes into a swimming pool and splashes a couple of women in swimsuits. The problem is, the movie takes place in September in New York — way too far north and too late in the year for anyone in New York to have their pool still open and in use.
  • It's Personal: Toomes agrees to disagree about the whole hero/villain thing, so long as Peter backs off, because Peter saved his daughter. At the end, he may be keeping Peter's identity secret for his daughter's sake or because he wants to get his own revenge. Either way, it's still personal.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Toomes is an arms dealer, selling very dangerous weapons to very dangerous people, but he's an Anti-Villain. We only see him kill one person on screen, and that was an accident. He only became the Vulture because the government, in cooperation with Stark, formed the Department of Damage Control and screwed him over on a contract. He wants to keep his employees employed and his family in a home. Once he gets sent to prison, Toomes doesn't tell anyone who Peter is.
  • Jerkass: The movie starts with the Department of Damage Control, newly formed, coming in and taking over the salvage operation Toomes is working on. His contract with the city is void, and he's stuck with the bill for his crew and the trucks he bought. The woman in charge of the operation is cold, but special note has to go to her subordinate.
    Dick: Maybe you shouldn't have over-extended yourself.
    Shocker I: [whistles]
    Toomes: Yeah, no, you're right. I shouldn't have over-extended myself. [punch]
  • Jerkass Has a Point: While Tony Stark isn't exactly warm and cuddly with Peter, every single bad thing that happened in the film could have been avoided if Peter had simply followed Tony's instructions. Tony was also right to tell Peter that without an internal source of validation, no amount of superheroics would ever be enough to fill the void.
    • Damage Control while unnecessairly cold and clearly able to compensate Toomes for his trouble, had a point that Toomes really shouldn't have expected the government would allow a small contractor company to handle dangerous alien wreckage, especially seeing what Toomes himself ending up doing with a single truckload.
  • Jerkass Realization: Offscreen, Tony seems to realize the ramifications of having forcibly recruited Peter into taking down Captain America and Bucky. He tries to be a better mentor, with mixed results. At the end, he realizes he was also wrong to be so aloof and dismissive to Peter and that he should take more of an active role with his mentoring since Peter clearly is ready for the big time.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Compared to his more relaxed attitude in the previous Iron Man movies, Happy comes across as pretty jerkish towards Peter throughout this movie, appearing to not take what he says seriously and hanging up when Ned tries to warn him about Toomes' plan. However, it is implied that Happy is frustrated by Peter's constant voice mails/texts even though he was told to be patient. However, throughout the movie, Tony drops little details (i.e. quitting band, being bought a churro) that indicate Happy is paying attention to what Peter reports and is passing the information on to Tony. Plus after Peter saves the day (and Happy's job), Happy apologizes and acts much nicer to him for the rest of the movie.
  • Jumped at the Call: Despite his initial reluctance, once Peter got a taste of the Avenger's world in Civil War, he is eager to participate and spends the first minutes of the movie (two months in movie time) pestering Happy Hogan through calls and texts and asking when's his next "mission".
  • Just Between You and Me: After he finds out that Peter Parker is Spider-Man in the car ride to take Peter and his daughter to the Homecoming dance, Adrian Toomes keeps Peter in the car to tell him that he won't hurt him since he saved his daughter. However, if Peter tries to interfere with his plans as the Vulture, then Adrian will not hesitate to kill him or go after his family.
  • Juxtaposed Halves Shot: Near the climax, Spider-Man is stuck under fallen rubble and takes off his mask to better breathe. The mask falls into a puddle and partially sinks, while the water reflects half of Peter's face on the other side, giving us a dual picture of Spider-Man/Peter Parker. This view reminds him of what he aspires to be, and inspires his Heroic Second Wind. It's also a Shout-Out to the comics, where Peter would often be portrayed with half his mask superimposed over his face to indicate he is thinking as Spidey, or his Spider-Sense is active while in his civilian identity.

    Tropes K to O 
  • Karma Houdini: Phineas Mason (The Tinkerer) escapes when the final heist goes south.
  • Kid Hero: Peter Parker himself is one, only being fifteen, and Tony Stark is conscious of this and wants to keep him out of trouble. Peter doesn't listen. Also pretty severely deconstructed: Peter has little experience and no real resources, so he seems to mostly deal with extremely minor crimes like stolen bikes (which he can't return). When he actually stumbles onto a real case he steps on the toes of the actual authorities.
  • Kids Driving Cars: Fifteen-year-old Peter Parker, while dressed as Spider-Man, decides to "borrow" the car of Flash Thompson. However, he has yet to have a licence and hasn't really had any practice aside from a driving around parking lot. Predictably his driving is awful and the car comes out worse for wear by the time he arrives at his destination.
  • Last Chance to Quit: After figuring out Peter is actually Spider-Man, the Vulture offers Peter a chance to back off, and threatens Peter's loved ones as well as Peter himself if he doesn't.
  • Last-Second Joke Problem: Peter Parker gets his Spider-Man suit back from Tony Stark and puts it on in his room. However, it turns out Aunt May saw him put it on and shouts "What the f-" just as the credits roll. Later movies show that she is okay with her nephew being Spider-Man as she lets him go on missions, but there's still the implication that Peter had some convincing to do to keep being Spider-Man.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
    • The trailer has Spidey saying "This is my chance to prove myself." Given the context of this film, this could not only be seen as a reference to Peter feeling like he's overshadowed by Iron Man and the other Avengers, but also to establish his franchise as part of the MCU.
    • Toward the end, when Tony asks Happy Hogan if he still has that engagement ring so he can propose to Pepper, Happy quips, "I've been hanging onto it since 2008!" 2008 is when Iron Man, and to a larger extent, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, first premiered.
    • The second stinger has two.
      • The stinger itself is a PSA from Captain America about the importance of patience. It ends with him concluding that sometimes being patient has drawbacks, as what you waited for can end up being meaningless or unsatisfying. It's a very meta joke aimed at the people who just sat through the credits hoping for an Avengers: Infinity War tease, only to get a cheesy PSA instead.
      • Captain America then asks someone offscreen "How many more of these?", which can also be a nod to how many MCU movies there have been so far, and the fact that it's widely rumored many of the Phase I heroes will retire after the events of Infinity War. The joke can also refer to the fact that the preceding MCU film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, had no less than five scenes embedded within its closing credits.
    • Peter's notes for upgrading his web fluid marks it as "Version 3.01". Appropriate as this is the third film incarnation of Spider-Man and the first solo movie of this reboot. It also marks the third interpretation on the source of Spider-Man's webbing. Raimi's version had organic web shooters; Webb's version used re-purposed Oscorp tech; and Watts' version returns to the original explanation that Peter invented it himself.
  • Legacy Character: After disintegrating Brice, Toomes picks up his gauntlet from the pile of ashes and tosses it to Schultz, telling here "Here, you're the Shocker now." It's almost a parody of the trope.
  • Lighter and Softer: Given that it is inspired by the teenage comedy films of John Hughes, Homecoming has the lightest tone of all the Spider-Man films.
  • Like Cannot Cut Like: Inverted. On the site of the Incident, the aliens' crashed technology is so resilient that Toomes' crew's tools can't cut through it. Toomes then demonstrates that the Chitauri metal can be used to cut through it.
  • Logo Joke: While the Sony and Columbia logos are treated straight, the Marvel Studios logo replaces the standard music accompaniment with a symphonic arrangement of the classic Spider-Man cartoon theme ("Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Does whatever a spider can...")
  • Longing Look: In the ending, Michelle gives Peter a curious look as he leaves. This is right after she denied she cares about where he's going. Although considering how carelessly he was holding his phone, it's also possible she saw he'd just received a message from Happy telling Peter to meet him in the toilet.
  • Loose Lips:
    • Discussed and played for comedy with Ned, who notes that he might not be able to keep Peter's secret because he's so excited that his friend is Spider-Man.
    • Played seriously when Toomes is driving Liz and Peter to the homecoming dance, and Liz obliviously lets slip information that helps Toomes piece together Peter's identity.
  • Lost in Imitation: Spider-Man Homecoming does tend to follow trends and reuse stuff from previous run of adaptations:
    • The Race Lift of Peter's supporting characters, and the downplaying of Peter from his original Friendless Background to slightly social with confidants, continues the trend started from Spider-Man (where Harry Osborn was made Peter's Only Friend compared to the comics), Ultimate Spider-Man (where he had Mary Jane), The Spectacular Spider-Man which altered the makeup of Liz Allan, Ned Leeds, among others.
    • In the comics, Vulture was a generic enemy with no personal connection to Peter or anyone. The change in the film where he turns out to be the father of Peter's crush continues the Sony tradition of making every Spider-Man rogue have personal connections to him out-of-costume (including Dr. Octopus, Dr. Connors, Sandman, Venom, Electro) when in the original comics, it was only Green Goblin who had that at first. All of them eventually find out Peter's identity, when again in the comics for most of the run, it was only the Green Goblin who knew that.
  • Lost in Translation: "Homecoming" is a Double-Meaning Title, which can mean both the return of the prodigal son and a high school tradition in the US (which takes place in the film). The title in Latin America is "Spider-Man: de regreso a casa", which translates the former but not the latter.
  • Loves My Alter Ego: Downplayed; Liz mentions having a crush on Spider-Man in an early scene but it doesn't get in the way of her returning Peter's affection later in the movie.
  • Lower-Deck Episode: Vulture's gang is made of blue collar workers who scavenge tech from former battlefields where the Avengers repelled world/cosmic threats, and they are too small in scale to attract the Avengers. Vulture himself isn't a world/cosmic threat, but is enough of a threat to Peter's small world (his family, friends and neighborhood) for Peter to confront him.
  • Made of Indestructium: Downplayed. Peter's phone falls hundreds of feet into water, and is apparently perfectly fine. At the end of the film, it's in a car in a collapsing building, and survives with nothing more than a severely cracked screen.
  • Male Gaze:
    • One scene in the trailer shows Peter and Ned spending much of their lunch period staring at Liz Allan. Michelle notices this and promptly calls them "losers".
    • Happens again right before the hotel swimming scene when Liz walks away from Peter, as the camera is focused firmly on her behind in a one-piece swimsuit.
  • Malevolent Masked Men: Early on, Peter faces a group of armed robbers who wear masks based on the core Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Hulk).
  • Marquee Alter Ego: Peter has his mask taken off a few times, and Shocker doesn't wear one at all. Inverted with the Vulture, who is usually mask-less in the comics but wears a full helmet here. Though both he and Peter take off their masks for the final Coney Island fight.
  • The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: On three separate occasions Peter has a chance to spend time with Liz, and every single time he has to jet off to fight villains. On the final one he abandons her at the homecoming dance to run off and fight her father. And he can't even explain why he has to leave, causing him to come off as unreliable and uncaring.
  • Mathematician's Answer: After an attempt to dramatically swing into action against the Vulture's henchmen fails (his web shooters had been configured to "combat mode", where they fire sticky bursts instead of swingable strands), he asks his suit A.I. what happened. She helpfully explains that "You jumped off of the sign and landed on your face."
  • Menacing Mask: Subverted during a bank robbery scene involving a gang of robbers with cartoonish plastic masks based on the comic versions of The Avengers that are a little too cartoonish to be intimidating. Not helped by Spider-Man quipping at them.
  • Misplaced Retribution: Adrian Toomes has every right to be upset about being stifled and driven underground in the cruel manner by Damage Control but him blaming Tony Stark for explicitly causing this seems harsh since the real guilty culprit is the US Government, as well as maybe the city government, who denied him just compensation. Tony Stark can at best be judged guilty of indifference or negligence, but even then Tony had a right to assume that the US Government would do its job and be fair to its citizens, and he merely worked alongside Damage Control rather than decide its policies.
  • Mission Control:
    • Ned talks about the trope as "the guy in the chair" and dreams of becoming Peter's. That wish is granted to him in the climax as he provides directions for Peter's car chase and provides information on the functions of the car Peter "borrowed".
    • Mason is this for Toomes and his crew during their heists.
  • Mistaken for Thief: A man starts prying the window of a car with a crowbar, when Spider-Man jumps in and webs the guy up. Unfortunately for Peter, the man angrily explains that it's his car and he had accidentally locked himself out of it.
  • Moment Killer: After the Washington Monument sequence, Peter has just saved Liz from certain death, they're sharing a Held Gaze, his suit's A.I. is even encouraging him to kiss her... and then his webbing gives out and he goes tumbling down the elevator shaft.
  • Monumental Damage:
    • The Washington Monument is cracked and slightly damaged, and its elevator gets wrecked.
    • In the climax, the plane carrying Stark tech goods ends up destroying the famous "Parachute Jump" tower at Coney Island as it crashes.
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • The first trailer is pretty lighthearted... and then the Vulture shows up and the tone gets much darker as the stakes are raised.
    • In the movie proper, we get an extended, humorous montage of Peter getting (made) ready for the homecoming ball before being dropped off at Liz' house. He rings the doorbell, most likely expecting to be greeted by his date, but instead he's suddenly face to face with her dad - the Vulture.
    • Happy wants to thank Peter for helping with the plane heist, he's convinced he would've lost his job, and before he met Tony [toilet flushes, kid steps out, washes his hands, leaves].
      Peter: How long have you...?
      Happy: Long enough to be awkward.
  • More Dakka: Vulture's equipped his flight suit with a variety of guns and laser weapons.
  • Movie Superheroes Wear Black: Zig-zagged.
    • Concept art reveals Vulture's costume has gray/black mixed with his costume. Yet it's similar to Peter's where it has black mixed with much brighter colors so it can be comic-accurate yet different. It has a lot of green, but also includes a dark bomber jacket, black accents, and a black helmet.
    • The Shocker has a realistic jacket that resembles his standard comics costume. So does his replacement.
    • Peter's homemade costume and the Stark suit are aversions, being bright red and blue. The second Stark suit, however, replaces the blue with black.
  • Mundane Utility:
    • Toomes and his crew have at their disposal an alien phase-shifting device that essentially allows them to create temporary holes in walls. This comes in handy when pulling heists involving locked containers. It also helps the Tinkerer grab a beer from the side of the fridge.
    • Spider-Man uses his webbing to capture bad guys or swing above the streets of New York, but also for simpler things like closing a door or making himself a hammock.
    • For that matter, Peter uses his Super-Strength to hide his equipment in the one place you probably wouldn't think to look — underneath an entire row of lockers, which he himself can easily pick up. He also uses his superhuman agility to hop over a fence and take a shortcut on his way back from school.
  • My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: As Peter starts to connect more with his suit A.I. Karen, she starts aiding when it comes to dating advice, to the point that she outright starts calling for Peter to kiss Liz when she senses now is an optimal romantic moment.
  • Mythology Gag: See here.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • The entire drama in the Washington Monument only happened because Peter had retrieved an unidentified piece of alien tech and Ned took it with him on a field trip, unaware that it's a dangerously unstable explosive. This adds a certain irony to Vulture being grateful to Peter for saving Liz's life- he'd undoubtedly be considerably less grateful if he knew it was Peter who was responsible for endangering her in the first place.
    • Spider-Man uses his taser webbing to disable Vulture's alien blaster which ends up causing the weapon to malfunction and starts bouncing around while blasting holes in the ship. When Spider-Man webs it to the floor, its beams are now fixed in place and it slices the ferry in half when it overloads. Vulture even warns that Spider-Man is messing with things he doesn't understand.
    • Because Tony doesn't inform Peter that he took Peter's warnings about Toomes seriously and tipped off the Feds, Peter ends up interfering with their sting operation as he tries to prove himself. In addition, Tony would have likely informed Peter immediately had he known Peter was on the ferry, but Peter had decided to remove the tracker in his suit.
    • Happy's Not Now, Kiddo attitude towards Peter leads him to brush off Peter's attempts to warn him that Toomes is going to rob the Avengers cargo plane, leaving Peter with no choice but to intervene directly, which ends up crashing the plane. Happy seems to be aware of this afterwards and goes out of his way to thank Peter for what he did.
    • Tony's vague and often flippant mentor-ship approach toward Peter left him unaware his suit has a "training wheels" protocol or how he was going to be trained to move beyond it. In his eagerness to prove himself, he has Ned disable the protocol which now leaves him with options he can select but has no idea how to use. Many of which, like "Instant Kill", he doesn't even want.
    • Department of Damage Control dismissal of Adrian Toomes and his crew after the Battle of New York is the cause of the entire film. Given that Toomes's company had some expertise in handling the Chitauri technology safely, their decision to shove him aside is not a good decision in the short term, never mind the long-term effects of pushing Toomes to become a weapons dealer. Would it have been so hard to hire him as a consultant with a 25% raise? Even if they had justified reasons in wanting to keep the tech in a closed, professional circle, they didn't seem to consider how Toomes would be compensated and just dismissed it as not their problem.
  • No Endor Holocaust: During Peter and the Vulture's fight on top off the jet, bits are falling off it it while city lights are visible underneath the plane. Even after an entire engine is sent plummeting from high altitude, there's no mention of it doing any damage or harming anyone.
  • No Full Name Given: Many of Peter's friends adapted from the comics have no last names in the movie, even appearing in the credits with only one name such as "Flash" for "Flash Thompson", Ned for Ned Leeds, and Liz for Liz Allan. This might be because many of the characters are given race and/or culture lifts. In the case of Liz, not giving her a last name hides the fact that her father is the Vulture. It also allows for the surprisingly sweet spoiler at the end that Michelle prefers to go by MJ and she shows up in every scene because that's where Peter is.
  • No Kill like Overkill:
    • Discussed. The weapons that Toomes makes seem more fit to be used against tanks than by street-level toughs. During the one deal we see his men trying to make, their potential customer rejects such overly powered weapons and requests something more low-profile.
      Aaron Davis: I just need something to stick up somebody. I'm not trying to shoot them back in time.
    • Discussed. Stark upgraded the Spider-Man suit to provide 576 possible web-shooter combinations and includes "Enhanced Combat Mode" with an "Instant Kill" feature. Peter even comments "Mr. Stark really overdid it".
  • Nonchalant Dodge: When fighting the gang of robbers, Spider-Man jumps up and clings to the ceiling, and when the Iron Man-masked thug tries to punch him in the face, he just lazily moves his head out of the way.
  • No-Nonsense Nemesis: The Vulture towards Spidey. During their first encounter, he doesn't waste time with threats; he grabs Spider-Man and drops him from a great height into a lake without a word. During their second fight, he pulls out an alien blaster and immediately starts trying to vaporize the wall-crawler. Later, he does offer Peter a chance to just walk away out of gratitude for saving his daughter, but when Peter declines, he sics the Shocker on him, who just starts whaling on Spidey and nearly beats him to death. During their next confrontation, Vulture finally starts trying to convince Spider-Man of his cause, but he admits it's mostly just as a way to stall for time, until his flight harness is powered-up. When it is powered-up, he collapses a building on top of him. During the fight on the Stark plane, he tries to force Peter back into an engine, and after the crash, goes right back to trying to kill him as soon as they recover, with no more words than "Hey, Pedro."
  • Noodle Incident: Surprisingly played for Black Comedy when Mr. Harrington gives a statement to the media following the incident at the Washington Monument:
    Mr. Harrington: I couldn't bear to lose a student on a field trip... Not again...
  • No Sympathy:
    • Played straight when Damage Control puts Toomes out of a job. By law, they (or the city) should at least offer compensation. The most they do is not press charges when Toomes punches a guy that makes fun of him.
    • Averted for Peter Parker; contrary to most of the Spider-Man movies, he receives a lot of sympathy from his classmates despite his constant screw-ups. It's implied that they know Uncle Ben recently died and thus are giving him space. Principal Morita has to put him in detention for disappearing during the Decathlon trip but tells him You Are Better than You Think You Are after Peter tries to skip out again. Liz also forgives him for the Decathlon disappearance since, as she pointed out, nearly dying puts things like a competition into perspective. After Peter stands her up at homecoming, while she admits it was a "crappy" thing for him to do, she only tells him she hopes he can work out his issues.
  • Not Helping Your Case:
    • When Ned discovers Peter is Spider-Man, Peter tries to deny it and quickly removes his costume, which results in him showing off his Heroic Build. Not to mention he does so with just the push of a button, showing the suit is more technologically advanced than anything a high-school student can afford.
    • When Tony starts laying into Peter after the ferry incident, noting how much of a risk he took in sticking up for a 14-year-old boy, Peter sullenly tells him he's 15. Needless to say, that doesn't make him look any more mature.
  • Not Now, Kiddo: Subverted. Happy's default attitude towards Peter throughout the film seems to be that he ignores his texts, doesn't answer his calls, and, on the rare occasion that Peter reaches him, dismisses whatever he says as unimportant. However, in his communications with Peter, Tony drops references to things Peter previously reported (e.g. churros, quitting band, etc) indicating that Happy was listening and conveying the information to Tony after all.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: When Peter confronts Toomes and accuses him of being an illegal arms dealer selling high tech weaponry to the highest bidder, Toomes points out that Tony started off as an arms dealer who sold high tech weaponry to the highest bidder as well.
  • Offhand Backhand: Peter does this to one of the Vulture's men with a web grenade during the ferry deal.
  • Oh, Crap!: Twice for Peter. Firstly, when he realizes Liz's dad is the Vulture... and that the Vulture realized that he's Spider-Man. And secondly, during the ending where Aunt May walks in on him wearing the Spider-Man suit, maskless.
  • One Dialogue, Two Conversations: From the second Liz's dad opens the door to welcome Peter in before chauffering them to the dance. At first, only Peter is aware that Liz's dad is the criminal arms dealer Vulture, and Liz's dad just thinks Peter is a nervous sophomore at his first homecoming. But then, on the course of the car ride, Pops clues in on Parker's identity and his honestly friendly demeanour becomes pure façade. Only after Liz goes in alone (so her dad can give Peter "the dad talk") does all pretense end on both sides.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
    • Michelle freaks out when she sees the explosion from the Washington Monument and tells Spider-Man, "My friends are in there!"
    • Peter drops his usual bravado and repartee when the ferry is blasted in half, at which point he visibly panics while doing what he can to save the lives of everyone aboard the ship.
    • Also, when The Vulture collapses a building down on Peter and he's trapped under the wreckage. Peter is scared out of his mind as he screams for the help that will never come.
    • Tony is extremely serious when he tells Peter to hand over the suit, and during the ferry scene, he's quite mission-focused and silent as he patches it back together, cutting Peter cold.
  • Overly Long Gag: Happy and Peter meet in the high school boys' bathroom to speak in private, but in the middle of the conversation, they have to stop and wait for a student to come out of one of the stalls, wash his hands, towel dry his hands, and leave. The student is clearly trying to be quick about it, but it still takes him a while.

    Tropes P to T 
  • Palette Swap: The Iron Man Mark 47 suit is exactly the same as Mark 46, just painted in the Ultimates color scheme.
  • Papa Wolf:
    • Do not mess with Toomes' family. He will defend them to the death. The man has a great many faults and issues, but the safety and happiness of his family seems to come before everything.
    • Stark chews Peter out for putting himself in lethal danger. "If someone else dies, that's on you. If you die, that's on me. God, I sound like my dad. ... I need the suit back."
  • Parental Substitute: Tony steps in as a father figure for Peter, chewing him out when he gets it wrong and supportin him when he gets it right.
    Tony: Hey, my father never really told me when I got it right, so I'm trying to break the cycle of shame, you know? You did a good job in DC.
  • Pet the Dog: The Vulture treats his former employees well especially since they followed him into his illegal gun-running career. He's shown as being fiercely protective of his family and chooses to not reveal Spider-Man's identity, presumably out of gratitude for Peter saving his life.
  • Playful Hacker: Ned manages to crack into the security systems of Peter's new Spider-Man suit and turn off the "training wheels" protocol. He even worries that doing so may be illegal.
  • Police Are Useless: Played With during the ferry incident. Peter thinks he's the only one with a chance of stopping the arms deal, but he actually winds up blundering into the middle of an FBI sting that might've stopped it with much less collateral damage without his interference. The key word is "might've" since they were regular agents going up against a costumed villain and his gang armed with super weapons. Thanks to Peter's interference, it's never made certain whether the sting would have worked.
  • Politically Incorrect Villain: Played with by Toomes/the Vulture. When we first meet him, he is admiring a drawing made by his child of the Avengers, but laments about how kids in his day used to play cowboys and Indians, only for one of his men to tactfully point out that it's now preferred to use "Native American". Toomes accepts the correction, but his traditionalist attitude leads the audience to believe he's this trope and heightening the shock when it's revealed that he's the father of biracial Liz Allen, Peter's classmate and crush, a Papa Wolf who's obviously Happily Married to Liz's African-American mother.
  • Poor Communication Kills:
    • Tony is visibly traumatized and regretting his actions in the previous film, namely in how Peter got hurt in the airport battle. In this film, he doesn't want Peter to join the Avengers because Peter could get hurt again. Peter finds this concern patronizing, thinking that Tony doesn't trust him enough to handle the bigger battles.
    • The damage to the ferry could have been prevented if Tony had told Peter that he had received the warning about the weapons deal and had tipped off the FBI. In fact, it's quite possible that he was calling Peter to tell him, just too late to stop him. It also could have been prevented had Peter allowed the conversation to play out instead of hanging up on Tony, if Tony called earlier than the actual sting itself, or if Peter hadn't removed the suit's tracker so Tony would know Peter was heading there. On the other hand, the FBI agents were not prepared to tangle with Toomes and his men either way and Tony genuinely did not seem to be aware of this, and if Tony had done a better job at listening to Peter, he could have sent in people who were better equipped to handle them.
    • The A.I. in Peter's suit says training was involved in order to unlock the full capabilities of the suit, and Tony put all of the abilities in the suit to begin with; clearly meant for Peter to begin tackling larger threats at some point in time. Keeping him closer to the ground as a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" is for experience. If Tony explained this to Peter instead of having Happy monitor Peter — Happy didn't communicate with Peter or keep him updated on things — Peter might have been more willing to earn his stripes. Peter never really aired any of his grievances about Tony "treating him as a kid", though that plays into both Tony and Happy not being available to Peter 24/7 or at all. Tony let his snark through and went ahead with naming programs in the suit, but Peter wasn't supposed to see those.
    • Happy repeatedly blows Peter off, having gotten frustrated with his constant status updates and inquiries about when the Avengers' next mission will be. This almost gets Peter killed at the end of the film, when Ned tries to warn Happy about Toomes' impending attack on the Avengers' plane, and Happy immediately hangs up when he hears Ned is calling on behalf of Peter.
  • Pop-Up Texting: Appears when Peter is texting Happy.
  • Pop-Up Trivia: The Blu-Ray has a "Spidey Study Guide" in lieu of a DVD Commentary.
  • Portable Hole: Toomes' crew has a device that functions like this. Handy for getting into secured containers or grabbing a beer from the fridge without getting up.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation:
    • Perhaps the best way to describe the film's approach to the Spider-mythos as opposed to the earlier Spider-Man Trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man Series which leaned more toward Adaptation Distillation of either the classic or Ultimate Marvel comics. The film recontextualizes Peter's superhero dynamic, now in relation to Tony Stark and the Avengers while the previous films had him as the only existing superhero. It's based on him being a Kid Hero who debuted long after them, with a healthy dose of Reality Subtext (Sony cooperating with the MCU for the first time), giving him a case of Hero Worship and a need to prove himself and to belong. As with the Younger and Hipper Aunt May in Civil War, his supporting cast is also revamped to be more modern.
    • In the classic comic books, the Tinkerer was originally portrayed as a member of an alien race using his people's out-of-this-world technology to hatch his evil schemes (before a Retcon established that he was a human masquerading as an alien for some reason). In Homecoming, he just peddles scavenged Chitauri and Ultron tech left over from the Avengers' battles.
  • Pragmatic Villainy:
    • The reason why Toomes refuses to consider the "High Altitude Job" the Tinkerer keeps insisting on, until he literally has no other choice. Stealing a plane full of artifacts, weapons and tech from the Avengers themselves is going to put him and his gang at the top of the most-wanted list and destroy the anonymity Toomes has worked so hard to maintain. This is also the reason why Toomes fires Brice. Brice's carelessness in using their advanced weapons technology in public is beginning to attract the unwanted attention of superheroes like Spider-Man and Iron Man who are far more powerful than what Toomes and his comparatively small-scale group are equipped to face.
    • Aaron Davis may be a crook looking for weapons for a job, but he has enough good sense to realize that most of the stuff Toomes' crew is trying to sell him is way too conspicuous, if not overkill. This is particularly prominent during the deal at the bridge, where Davis emphasizes that he just wanted a small, concealable weapon for simple holdups, while Brice pulls out bigger and fancier tech that could be used for fighting the Hulk. Later, when Peter hilariously fails at interrogating Davis, the latter points out that he lives in that neighborhood, and, more importantly, so does his family, and he really doesn't want those weapons floating around in Brooklyn.
    • Toomes tells Peter to walk away or else, giving him one shot because he saved Liz's life. Then he drives away and leaves him at the dance. And also calls Shocker to come and take Peter out if he makes the wrong choice.
  • Precision F-Strike: Combined with curse cut short. The last line of the film is Aunt May walking in on Peter donning his newly reacquired Spider Suit.
    May: WHAT THE F—[Smash Cut to the credits]
  • Previously on…: One of the earliest scenes in the movie takes place shortly before the airport battle in Civil War. Peter dons the Cheap Costume that he made before "Happy" Hogan tells him that Stark made an upgraded version that he left in a briefcase. Upon seeing the suit, Peter calls it "the coolest thing I've ever seen!". Later, we see Stark take Peter home, letting him know that he can keep the upgraded suit. This basically serves as a recap of Peter's involvement in Captain America: Civil War.
  • Product Placement: Both Flash and Stark have Audis. Peter is also seen snacking on Doritos during a montage.
  • Properly Paranoid: After threatening Peter into backing off, Toomes has Herman wait outside the building, anticipating that Spider-Man likely wouldn't heed the warning.
  • Publicly Discussing the Secret: After Ned finds out the truth about the "Stark Internship", he keeps pestering an increasingly concerned Peter about being Spider-Man in places like shop class, P.E., and lunch.
  • Pull the Thread: Toomes notices that Peter conveniently disappeared at the same time that Spider-Man appeared to mess up his plans or save his daughter's life. He quizzes Peter a bit and gives him the "dad talk", meaning he threatens to kill Peter if the kid ever messes with his business again.
  • Put on a Prison Bus: Unlike most MCU villains, Adrian Toomes/The Vulture is arrested and sent to prison instead of dying. There is a quick scene near the end showing Toomes in prison, where he meets Mac Gargan, a minor villain from earlier who also got arrested.
  • Race Lift: This happens to a good number of characters from the comics' canon, due to Marvel wanting to diversify the cast for this installment in order to better reflect the contemporary real life New York.
    • Liz Allan, who is a white blonde in the comics, is played by the biracial actress Laura Harrier.
    • "Flash" Thompson, another white blond in the comics, is played by Guatemalan actor Tony Revolori.
    • Ned Leeds, yet another white blond in the comics, is played by Filipino-American Hawaiian actor Jacob Batalon. If you look at his character as being Ganke Lee in all but name, he could technically count for that character as well, having Filipino instead of Korean heritage.
    • A lesser example, but according to Mr. Delmar, Aunt May is "a hot Italian woman" in the movie (similar to her actress, Marisa Tomei, who is of Italian heritage), while every other version of May has always been Irish-American.
    • The Shocker, a white brunette in the comics, is played by African-American actor Bokeem Woodbine. Although there is another Shocker in the movie that's played by a white brunette (Logan Marshall-Green) — he's just not Herman Schultz.
    • The last few minutes of the film reveal that Michelle, played by Zendaya, prefers that her friends call her MJ. Downplayed, though, as she is still definitely not actually Mary Jane Watson.
  • Rapid-Fire "No!": Cindy does this when she and the rest of the decathlon team learn that Peter is quitting to focus on his "Stark internship".
  • Red Herring: When Peter is spying on Vulture's henchmen in the school, one of them notes that Toomes would be shocked to hear where they're searching, and Toomes is later shown focusing nervously when watching the report of the Monument incident, seemingly implying that Toomes, having mentioned his preference for being "under the radar" is not willing to see civilians, especially children, being put in harm's way by his schemes. This is actually because Liz (a student at the school who was almost killed in the incident) is his daughter, and he is more than willing to kill Peter, who he knows is a teenager, for getting in his way.
  • Read the Freaking Manual: Tony Stark intended for Peter to experiment with his suit and unlock its functions one at a time through "rigorous" guided training. However, Peter bypasses the "Training Wheel Protocol" and suddenly gets access to hundreds of functions without knowing what any of them do. In fact, it resets all his defaults so that he can't even web swing any more so he takes advantage of a quiet moment to try out some new moves.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Both Peter and May have gotten the Younger and Hipper treatment, with their actors having been accused of being too young for the roles. But perhaps not: Tom Holland, at 19, is vastly younger than the previous two live-action Peter Parker actors but still significantly older than the character. Meanwhile Marisa Tomei at 51 is much younger than any previous incarnation of Aunt May, but when you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the elderly Aunt May of tradition, as she's always supposed to have been his aunt, not his great-aunt (i.e., old enough to be his mother, not his grandmother).
  • Reconstruction: The film reconstructs Spider-Man's interaction with New York, whereas in the comics often makes Spider-Man a subject of disdain thanks to the Daily Bugle. Here Peter is a local superhero in a vibrant New York whose troubles come from wanting to become something more than just a local hero and attempting to stop a weapons deal only to find himself out of his depth and unintentionally being a Spider Menace. However, he still saves the day at the end, and is beginning to achieve fame once more.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Spider-Man suit switching to "Instant Kill" is signaled by the eyepieces shrinking to small, menacing glowing red lights. Of course, Peter doesn't want anything to do with it.
  • Refusal of the Call: Peter decides not to join the Avengers after all, preferring to be New York's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
  • Reimagining the Artifact: Since like most adaptations of Spider-Man, it focuses on the early years of his character rather than the greater period of time he was an Experienced Protagonist (as in current comics continuity), many of the classic elements of Spider-Man's teenage era are updated and re-imagined for a 21st Century setting:
    • Unlike Sam Raimi's Spider-Man series which took an Anachronism Stew approach in portraying New York City (with aspects from multiple eras of the city's history, including an elevated train in Manhattan which hadn't existed for decades), this film is set in the contemporary gentrified New York City, with characters using the internet and being very web-savvy. Peter is likewise shown mostly residing in Queens, similar to the Ultimate Universe comics and not in Manhattan, since that's where a lower-income teenager would logistically still be able to reside and call himself a New Yorker while Manhattan and Brooklyn have become too expensive. This also results in Midtown High School being changed from a standard NYC public high school to one of its specialized magnet public schools for high-achieving students as that's where a student with Peter's intellect and background would logically go to school.
    • In a departure from the comics and the previous five Spider-Man movies, May and Peter live in an apartment rather than a fairly spacious house. While making Civil War, the Russo brothers mentioned that they did this because they wanted to reflect the kind of home a family like the Parkers would realistically be able to afford in the current economic climate.
    • Much of Peter's teenage angst was based on The '50s-era "jocks versus nerds" attitude which showed up in Sam Raimi's and Marc Webb's films (albeit slightly more in the former than the latter). However, Homecoming is set in The New '10s where nerd culture has more or less become mainstream and much of this old attitude has been discredited or faded, causing Peter's school dynamic to change. In the Steve Ditko — Stan Lee run, he was the embodiment of an Intelligence Equals Isolation, No Social Skills, and Loners Are Freaks adolescence, while in Homecoming, Peter has a Fat Best Friend who shares similar interests, his classmates are impressed with his intellect and have a cordial relationship with him, and Flash Thompson is no longer a stereotypical jock bully, but a rich kid academic rival whose bullying tactics are primarily verbal and social in nature instead of physical.
    • The behind-the-scenes video also notes that Aunt May would no longer be the same kind of character, since the original Aunt May was rooted in a pre-feminist Greatest Generation idea of an ideal maternal figure, whereas in The New '10s, an aunt figure who looks after an orphan kid as a single parent would be closer to a "big sister" in dynamics, owing to the slowing down of the aging process and the erosion of The Generation Gap. The writers also pointed out that it didn't make sense in a contemporary context that Peter's uncle and aunt would be so much older than his parents, as compared to Cliff Robertson and Rosemary Harris in Spider-Man Trilogy who were visibly older than Norman Osborn (from the same generation as Peter's parents).
    • In the case of Michelle or as her friends call her, MJ, she is also a contemporary update on Mary Jane Watson's archetype. The original MJ was a '60s liberated woman inserted into Peter's more staid social circle that was a little behind contemporary teenage lifenote . Since attitudes have changed 50 years later, the new MJ is a modern take on an opinionated free spirit reflective of actual concerns of Generation Z, namely being a student protestor with an anti-authoritarian streak.
  • Related in the Adaptation: In this continuity, Liz Allan is the daughter of Adrian Toomes, the Vulture.
  • Relationship Upgrade: Not only are Tony and Pepper back together, after their Offscreen Breakup before Civil War, they end up hypothetically engaged as an excuse for the failed press conference Peter unintentionally ruins when he declines to join the Avengers at the end of the movie.
  • Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Spider-Man ends up blowing an FBI sting dealing with a weapons shipping related to Toomes. In this case, Poor Communication Kills as Peter acted because he thought Happy and Tony weren't listening to him, while Tony passed that information to the FBI and didn't tell Peter about it.
  • The Rival: "Flash" Thompson sees himself as one to Peter. He's not happy when he gets a question wrong and Peter answers it correctly (in spite of him visibly not paying attention).
  • Rogues' Gallery Transplant: A variation. Vulture is a Spider-Man nemesis in the comics, and he is the main villain of Spider-Man: Homecoming. However, his primary beef isn't with Spider-Man, it's with the Department of Damage Control, with an It's Personal vendetta against the latter due to being the direct cause of him going out of business, whereas the former is mainly in his way achieving that goal.
  • Ruder and Cruder: Homecoming is the first Spider-Man film to use moderate to strong profanity, and it has more swearing than all the previous films combined — which, all told, is still pretty mild compared to most action films.
  • Rule of Fun: In-universe, Peter tells Happy this is why he's narrating his video diary despite the fact that no-one else will be allowed to watch it.
  • Rule of Symbolism: In the car on the way to the dance, as Toomes figures out that Peter is Spider-Man, a stoplight is reflected in the windshield, painting Toomes's face in red light.
  • Running Gag:
    • People commenting on how hot Aunt May is or hitting on her... right in front of Peter.
    • The Captain America PSAs.
    • At one point, Ned complains to Peter that they have a Spanish quiz, which he prioritizes over Peter needing to go out and be Spider-Man. Later, Karen asks Peter how his Spanish quiz went. Later again, Peter is answering a question in Spanish class and getting praised for his success.
    • When Peter first activates Karen and the other higher functions of his suit when preparing to fight the Vulture's gang, he authorizes Karen to engage "Enhanced Combat Mode", she then activates "Instant Kill", which he quickly tells her to shut off. Later, during the ferry scene, she offers to do it again.
      Spider-Man: No, Karen, stop it with the "Instant Kill" already!
    • Stark is shown to have the tendency to give the "mentoring" features of the Spider-Suit rather patronizing names. When Ned is analyzing the suit, he discovers many of the sub-systems are disabled due to the "Training Wheels Protocol". Later, Peter learns that Karen has recorded everything he sees under the "Baby-Monitor Protocol".
    • Stark patches up the Staten Island ferry and tells Peter he screwed the pooch by almost destroying the ferry. At the film's end, when Stark is offering Peter a position on the Avengers, Peter's told he then fixed the problems he caused when he got the pooch checked out at the vet and raised their hybrid children.
    • Ned's "confidence hat", which first shows up at Liz's party and later at the actual homecoming dance.
    • Michelle goes to detention just to draw the sad people there. When Peter goes and actually stays, she shows off a drawing she made of him.
    • While looking for crimes to thwart, Spidey ends up leaving a stolen bicycle webbed up with a written note. When Happy and Damage Control find the plane wreckage, they also find the crates of tech, along with Toomes webbed up in a similar manner, complete with written note.
    • Peter's incredulous reactions to all the tech Tony Stark put in the suit. Stark took it almost to Bat-Gadget levels.
  • Saved by the Awesome: Tony is so grateful that Peter foils Vulture's last heist that he doesn't worry about the fact that Peter directly disobeyed his order to keep his superheroing away from the villain.
  • Save the Villain: Spider-Man saves Vulture from dying after his suit breaks and leaves him trapped among the flaming wreckage of a jet.
  • Secret Handshake: Peter and Ned have a pretty elaborate one (doubling as a Shout-Out to Sony's last movie about science heroes, Ghostbusters (2016)).
  • Secret Identity: Peter Parker is distinct from most MCU superheroes in that he actively tries to hide the fact he's actually a superhero, let alone Spider-Man. Having to keep his identity secret while still actively managing life as a teenager serves as a major focus of the movie's narrative. Much like his Ultimate counterpart, he fails: Ned, the Vulture, and Aunt May either find or figure it out.
  • Secret-Keeper:
    • Ned finds out that Peter is Spider-Man, and is quickly sworn to secrecy. At first, he really sucks at being the secret-keeper, blurting that Peter knows Spider-Man in gym class, but, to cut him some slack, he had just found out his friend is a vigilante and was really excited about how awesome it is. He calms down and gets better at it over the course of the movie.
    • Tony Stark knows, carrying over from a previous film, and Happy is also aware, being Peter's chaperone in Berlin and acting as Peter's go-between for Tony. Presumably, Pepper Potts also knows.
    • Vulture figures out Spider-Man's secret identity on his own, but refuses to tell anyone else who he is. At the end, May sees it for herself.
  • Secret Test of Character: An unusual case in that Peter ends up mistakenly believing Tony's offer to join the Avengers is this and that he chose correctly by turning down the offer. Tony plays along to save face, but he was legitimately giving him an offer and even had a press conference prepared in the next room to publicly announce his addition to the team. Despite this, Tony is still proud of Peter's decision.
  • Self-Disposing Villain: Subverted. Toomes attempts to lift a heavy crate of stolen goods instead of simply escaping, overloading his wings. Peter recognizes that the wings will explode and he desperately pleads with Toomes to stop; Toomes doesn't listen to him, too trapped in his own greed. When they do explode, it looks like he died... then Peter runs into the wreckage himself to save him.
  • Series Continuity Error:
    • The opening scene where Toomes is cleaning up the wreckage from the Battle of New York is stated to take place eight years before the events of Homecoming. However, Homecoming is set two months after Civil War, which established that the Battle of New York (the Avengers' formation) happened four years before the events of that film. Additionally, Civil War establishes that its been eight years since the events of the first Iron Man, making it impossible for Avengers to be set eight years prior.
    • When Toomes breaks into the jet carrying all the tech from Avengers Tower, the Mark 42 suit is seen in the background, complete with all of its battle damage from Iron Man 3. Considering that Tony had J.A.R.V.I.S. destroy the Mark 42 while he had Killian trapped inside it, it seems unusual and unlikely that Stark would rebuild the suit while intentionally incorporating the marks and damages it sustained beforehand.
    • In The Stinger for Civil War, we see that Peter got a black eye (either from Captain America's Shield Bash, or from Ant-Man swatting him across the airport). We see Peter returning from the fight in this movie and the black eye is nowhere to be seen, although the deli owner, Mr. Delmar, asks about his eye early in the film.
    • Peter's video diary at the beginning has a handful of minor differences with regard the airport battle compared to how it was shown in Captain America: Civil War. One notable variance being him saying "Hey, everyone!" immediately after snatching Cap's shield.
  • Shipper on Deck:
    • Karen, the A.I. in Peter's Stark-Tech suit, who pushes Peter to confess his love to Liz. At one point, she outright tells him to kiss her after rescuing her.
    • Happy Hogan has been carrying an engagement ring in his pocket on the off-chance that Tony needs to propose to Pepper... since 2008.
  • Ship Tease: Michelle spends most of the movie following Peter around, making snarky comments at him, telling him he's a loser, keeping track of his activities... but she's not obsessed with him, just observant. At the end of the film, she clearly leers at Peter's butt as he walks away, before having a soft, concerned look on her face.
  • Shirtless Scene: Peter gets two. A brief one when first putting on the suit and a longer one after first taking it off.
  • Shout-Out: See here.
  • Shown Their Work: Though it's difficult to see in the distant shots, the film includes the Washington Monument's aluminum cap.
  • Sidetracked by the Analogy: Towards the end, Tony Stark tells Peter, "You screwed the pooch, but then you did the right thing; you took her to the free clinic, you raised the hybrid puppies, okay that's not a great analogy..."
  • Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Liz admits to having a crush on Spider-Man because he helps people with little to no reward and is a good person. She later reciprocates Peter's crush on her, going to homecoming with him, and her father Adrian also offhandedly mentions that after realizing Peter is the heroic Spider-Man, sees why his daughter likes him.
  • Skewed Priorities:
    • Being a teenager, Peter's reason for telling Ned to keep his identity as Spider-Man a secret is less protecting his friends and family from retaliation by criminals, and more fear of being permanently grounded by Aunt May.
      Peter: You know what she's like! If she finds out people are trying to kill me every single night, she's not going to let me do this anymore!
    • Also, when the kids on the Decathlon team are being rescued from the damaged elevator at the top of the Washington Monument, Flash seems more concerned with the trophy they'd just won. To be fair, he is probably panicking and not thinking clearly, but it still makes him look like an idiot. The other kids are telling him to just drop it and his insistence on rescuing the trophy before himself is making him take longer to get out and delaying their own rescue; his actions are bordering on Lethally Stupid.
    • According to Ned, one advantage of being an Avenger is that it increases your dating potential.
      Ned: Dude, you're an Avenger. If any one of us has a chance with a senior girl, it's you.
  • Sky Heist: One of these forms the climax of the movie with Vulture attempting to use his flight suit to rob a plane carrying Avengers weaponry that they were moving to their new Upstate New York headquarters.
  • Slobs Versus Snobs: A repeated theme represented as the "rich and powerful" verses the "little guy". This is the situation he tries to make Peter understand during his Motive Rant.
    Adrian Toomes: How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that tower, or any of his little toys? Those people, Pete, those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, like you and me... they don't care about us. We build their roads and we fight all their wars and everything. They don't care about us. We have to pick up after them. We have to eat their table scraps. That's how it is. I know you know what I'm talking about, Peter.
  • So Proud of You: Tony already admires Peter and is trying to keep him out of the fray because Peter is just a child fighting an adult's war. In the movie itself, there are two occasions. The first is after the Washington Monument rescue, where Tony tells him he did a good job. The second time is after the climax, where Tony says he did such a good job that he's ready for the big time as an Avenger.
  • Spanner in the Works: Toomes points out that his operation has completely flown under everyone's radar for eight years... and now one guy in spandex and red tights shows up and jeopardizes the whole thing.
  • Spell My Name with a "The": Peter, as Spider-Man, is often referred to as the Spider-Man by the various citizens of New York, although he'd rather just be referred to as Spider-Man.
  • Stab the Salad: Adrian Toomes uses a rather large kitchen knife as a pointer while talking to Peter when he comes to pickup Liz, but it's because Toomes is at home, cutting up some vegetables for dinner.
  • Stacked Characters Poster: This◊ poster for the film has all major characters stacked upon a column.
  • Stealth Pun: The Stinger teases the Scorpion. Scorpions are famous for having stingers. Also, we're first introduced to him as the target of a Sting operation by the FBI.
  • The Stinger: Two.
    • The first is a Sequel Hook. Toomes goes to prison and meeting up with Gargan (a.k.a. The Scorpion) in prison, who notes that more than a few of his friends want Spider-Man dead as he plots an escape. Gargan says that there is a rumor that Toomes knows who is under the mask. Toomes says he doesn't and then smiles after Gargan leaves before meeting with his family.
    • The second is a joke in the form of another Captain America PSA about the importance of patience, and how sometimes it isn't necessarily rewarded — a joke at the expense of the portion of the audience hoping for a look at another movie.
  • Stock Sound Effects: When in flight, Vulture's suit frequently produces a noise that fans of the Star Wars prequel trilogy might recognize as the same one used for Naboo starfighters flying by the camera.
  • Stupid Crooks: Jackson Brice a.k.a. "the Shocker", so much. He fires off highly destructive weapons in the middle of the suburbs to advertise them to a small-time prowler who doesn't appreciate his attempt at "upselling", acts with absurd reckless abandon during the ensuing chase with Spider-Man, arrogantly back-talks his boss when Toomes chews him out for his stupidity, then when Toomes fires him he tries to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his activities to his family. It's almost a relief when Toomes kills him for this, albeit accidentally.
  • Stylistic Suck: The Midtown High news show that Betty and Jason are the anchors of is painfully bad, with bad green screen and Comic Sans... but a great source of Cringe Comedy.
  • Superhero Movie Villains Die: Expected given the MCU's track record regarding its villains. Towards the end of the movie, Toomes' greed keeps him from noticing that his damaged wings are about to explode. Ultimately, the trope is Subverted when Toomes is shown to survive his wings blowing apart and Peter rushes into the fire to carry his unconscious body to safety. Toomes' appearance in prison during the mid-credits stinger shows that he is alive and able to participate in future stories.
  • Superhero Origin: Averted. Despite this film being Spider-Man's first full-length MCU solo film, it is set about eight months after Peter became a superhero. Peter does tell Ned about the spider that bit him and the death of Uncle Ben is alluded to, but neither are shown.
  • Superman Stays Out of Gotham:
    • Averted for the second time in Phase 3 — Tony Stark suits up as Iron Man to help Spider-Man on two occasions. However, he doesn't actually fight Vulture and keeps his distance. When Peter asks if the Avengers are going to go after him and/or the petty criminals that he supplies, Tony brushes it off as "below their pay-grade". Instead, he tips the FBI off to Toomes, but doesn't tell Peter this. It doesn't end well.
    • Played straight at the same time. Despite also taking place in New York City, no references are made at all to any of the Netflix shows that take place in Manhattan, across the river from Peter's Queens home (The Defenders, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and The Punisher).
  • Super-Toughness: What was already hinted in Civil War becomes very obvious here: Peter's resistance is fully superhuman. The amount of punishment Spider-Man endures through the movie would easily kill an ordinary human, and even badly maim a Super-Soldier. Notably, he gets bounced up and down by an Anti-Gravity gun, dragged behind a van and repeatedly slammed against trashcans and brick walls, supports the full weight of two halves of a ferry for a few seconds without his arms tearing off, is slammed into — and then through — a bus by the Shocker, is buried under a whole warehouse crumbling into him, and then survives a plane crash followed by a thorough beating from the Vulture, without even having to go to the hospital afterward. The suit Tony provided Peter with also counts, as it takes all the same abuse and doesn't have so much as a scratch, or even any of its features disabled.
  • Supervillain Lair: Discussed.
    Ned: They have a lair?
    Peter: Dude, a gang with alien guns run by a guy with wings? Yeah, they have a lair.
    Ned: Badass.
  • Sure, Let's Go with That: When Peter asks Tony and Happy to affirm that the Avengers offer was a Secret Test of Character, they say that it was, even though it's revealed a moment later that it wasn't.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As shown in Civil War, Peter is still new to the whole Spider-Man thing, and clearly has a few kinks to work out in his overall capabilities on top of still being a Kid Hero that makes reckless judgement calls trying to prove himself ready for real superhero-dom — something not helped by Tony having called him to help take on half the Avengers before. This leads to him trying to do everything himself, Ned's aid aside, and thinking he's being babied by Tony (which, given the "Training Wheels" and "Baby-Monitor" modes of his suit, he was), while Tony, as per usual since the Ultron incident, refuses to ever actually talk to anyone properly about anything going on. This leads to a massive communications breakdown and Tony temporarily disowning Peter of everything, suit included, for thinking he was just a reckless kid after all when a collateral ferry disaster ensues as a result.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: After Michelle lists exactly which clubs Peter dropped out of, the other members of the decathlon team all look at her, puzzled. Michelle loses her sarcastic calm and immediately claims, "I'm not obsessed with him, I'm just very observant."
  • Swiss-Cheese Security: The DODC warehouse where they store the salvaged alien tech is described as the most secure facility on the East Coast, yet Spidey ends up inside by accident while unconscious showing there was no review of the truck's contents before storing it, roams around unhindered because apparently there aren't cameras monitoring the location, opens an armored access door by brute-forcing the numerical door code 246 times without triggering any kind of "invalid passcode" alert, and finally leaves the facility by hitching a ride on top of a truck trailer while driving right past a guard who has a line of sight view of the top of the truck. Presumably all the security is focused on outside forces getting in.
  • Switching P.O.V.: The Vlog at the beginning of the movie is a different take on the events of Civil War — before, during and after the airport battle in Germany —, this time from Peter Parker/Spider-Man's viewpoint.
  • Take That, Audience!: Those who stick around until the second stinger at the very end of the credits get a PSA from Captain America on the value of patience, which may result in you wondering "why you waited so long for something so disappointing."
  • Talking Your Way Out: Inverted at the warehouse after prom. Toomes distracts Peter long enough for his suit to get airborne.
  • Tall Poppy Syndrome: Toomes clearly feels this way in the opening sequence. He was ambitious and wanting to make a profit salvaging Chitauri tech using a legal city contract. When Damage Control shuts his operation down, one of the agents insultingly mocks him for trying to rise out of his position, dismissing his concerns about his future investment with the patronizing remark that he should have thought of it before "overextending himself". Toomes loses his temper and punches him.
  • The Teaser: The prologue establishing Toomes' origins as The Vulture is sandwiched in-between the Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios vanity plates.
  • Technicolor Science: A blink-and-you-miss-it example. Whatever the final ingredient of web-fluid is, it's popsicle orange.
  • Television Geography: During the first scene at the sandwich shop that is supposedly located in Queens, a MARTA bus can be seen driving past the shop, betraying the Atlanta filming location.
  • Temporary Substitute: Tony Stark's role was originally meant for Nick Fury, which would have been similar to their relationship in the Ultimate comics and cartoon.
  • Tempting Fate: After the ferry incident, Peter rages at Iron Man. He says if Tony actually cared, he'd be there in person instead of operating the suit remotely. The suit opens and a very angry Tony steps out.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Vulture's gang is selling reversed engineered alien superweapons to common criminals with more firepower than they can safely handle. Aaron Davis all but says as much when they try to sell some to him.
  • Third-Party Deal Breaker: In The Teaser, Adrian Toomes's construction company is starting a contract with New York City to clean up and salvage alien debris left from the Chitauri invasion, but then the Stark Industries-backed Department of Damage Control seizes the contract, leaving Toomes with the bills for the equipment he bought and employees he hired for the job but no revenue to pay them. This leads to Toomes becoming an Arms Dealer of stolen Chitauri weapons to keep his family and employees fed and housed.
  • Thou Shall Not Kill: Peter immediately refuses the "Instant Kill" feature when Karen activates it or suggests it.
  • Throwback Threads: Peter has been using the enhanced Spider-Man costume from Tony Stark from Captain America: Civil War since the start, but around 2/3 into the movie, Spider-Man unintentionally causes a disaster on a ship while trying to beat up the bad guys, forcing Iron Man to interfere and help; after that, Tony gives Peter a scolding and takes away his suit, thinking that Peter isn't ready yet. In the climax, he has to break out his dingy old costume (that only has the webshooters and less futuristic eye lenses) in order to stop the Vulture.
  • Took a Level in Jerkass: Happy having done this drives a fair amount of the plot.
  • Tough Love: At the end of the film, Tony states that everything he put Peter through, including taking away his advanced suit when he screwed up the ferry incident, helped him grow through adversity and self-reliance, saying that it made Peter into a better hero and person from the experience.
  • Trailers Always Lie:
    • The first trailer makes it look like Peter goes to the Avengers headquarters in the middle of the film to warn Stark about the Vulture and his weapons. In the actual film, he warns Stark over the phone and doesn't get to visit the headquarters until after he defeats the Vulture and is offered a spot on the team.
    • One trailer shows Peter and Liz sharing a kiss, but this was cut from the final version.
  • Trailers Always Spoil: The second full trailer gives away the twist that the ferry incident is not the climax of the film, driving Tony to take the suit he gave to Peter back to make him stop endangering himself. This forces Peter to go back to his improvised suit to keep fighting.
  • Training Montage: Spidey gets locked in the Damage Control vault by accident, and brushes up on his suit functions. Then he asks the suit A.I. how long he's been in there: 37 minutes.
  • Tranquil Fury: Tony's voice when he shows up to bail Peter out of the ferry fiasco is dripping with this.
    Tony Stark: Hi, Spider-Man. "Band practice", was it?
  • Trap Is the Only Option: Peter walks into an obvious trap with the Vulture, alone in an empty warehouse after he'd figured out the Vulture was suiting up to go after the Stark flight. He's just starting out, so he doesn't figure it out.
  • Triumphant Reprise: Vulture's menacing Leitmotif is given a heroic spin when he first opens a canister of arc reactors on the plane.
  • Truer to the Text:
    • This is the first Spider-Man film in a Shared Universe, and the overall tone and approach is truer to Ultimate Spider-Man note  than the cartoon version. The Shared Universe also emphasizes Peter's status as Small Steps Hero and the generally low stakes of the stories is actually true to the general storytelling of the majority of Spider-Man comics in either 616 or Ultimate comics. Spider-Man in the comics doesn't really get to save the world or participate in the really big events of the superhero universe (usually done by the Fantastic Four or X-Men, and later the Avengers), which the earlier movies never really conveyed since by making him the only superhero, it automatically raised his profile and the stakes of the story within the setting.
    • Peter is also shown entirely creating his original webshooter and the webbing formula (in The Amazing Spider-Man films, Peter co-opted and redesigned Oscorp tech rather than create it wholesale). He even mentions several times that the webbing dissolves after a few hours have passed. Likewise, while most of the gadgetry he utilizes in the film is an "upgrade" designed by Stark and integrated into his suit, Peter in the comics has always had an array of gadgets that he uses regularly, including specialized webbing, trackers and a Spider Signal. One gadget is a wingsuit deployment, which is the first time that any live-action Spider-Man suit has depicted the webbing stretched between his arms and torso.
    • The downplaying of Uncle Ben and his aesop is also truer than many even know. To start with, "...in this world, with great power there must also come great responsibility" was the narrative caption at the end of Peter's origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15 and not something known to Peter or the characters. It was never an intrinsic part of Spider-Man's mythos for most of the first 25 years. It was first attributed to Uncle Ben in 1987 in Christopher Priest (comics) Spider-Man vs. Wolverine #1. Peter was always motivated by guilt and duty to his Uncle and Aunt, but the idea of that being tied to a specific motto and slogan wasn't part of his early adventures.
  • Turbine Blender: In the climax High-Altitude Battle, there's one scene where Peter gets sucked into one of the stealth plane's jet engines. Luckily, Peter manages to web up the turbine just in time before it could shred him to pieces. Although he wasn't sure it would work.
  • Twerp Sweating: Intensely played with for dramatic effect.
    • Initially, the trope is largely downplayed. When Peter goes to pick up Liz for the homecoming dance, he discovers her father is Adrian Toomes a.k.a. the Vulture, but he doesn't recognize Peter. Although played somewhat straight as Toomes tests Peter about having a drink (with refusing it due to being underage being the right answer) because he seems very stressed out, the fact is that Toomes is actually pretty laid back and doesn't want to give Peter a hard time.
    • During the drive to the dance, however, Toomes figures out that Peter is Spider-Man, adding to the dramatic tension, and the trope ends up being subverted. Once they arrive, Toomes shoos Liz inside, pretending he wants to give Peter "the Dad talk". He then pulls out a gun and says because Peter saved his daughter, Toomes will give him a Last Chance to Quit, warning Peter to never interfere with his plans again. Otherwise he'll kill Peter and everyone he loves. He then puts the gun away and gives Peter a big grin, telling him to go to the dance and show his daughter a good time — just not too good! Peter, as one would expect, exits the car and walks numbly in a daze towards the school.
  • Two Decades Behind: The Captain America PSA videos are this in-universe. For obvious reasons, he must have filmed them sometime in the 2010s (presumably not that long after the events of The Avengers, based on his uniform), but both the concept and its presentation are straight out of the late 1980s to early '90s. Making things even funnier is that these videos were filmed on VHS, a format that became obsolete over decade before the events of the movie.

    Tropes U to Z 
  • Ultimate Universe: More apparent with this film than the other MCU films which borrow a lot from the 616 continuity. Homecoming (in an effort to distinguish itself from the earlier Spider-Man adaptations) takes cues from Ultimate Spider-Man, its cartoon adaptation, as well as adding its own elements:
    • This is the first filmed Spider-Man to exist in a shared superhero universe. In the comics, Peter was interacting with the Fantastic Four (who had Iron Man's MCU role of kick-starting the modern shared 'verse) from the start of his career. The film's costume also visually resembles the original costume design featuring the Spider-Signal and the underarm webbing. On the other hand, in his early days Spider-Man was very much the loner of the Marvel Universe, regarded as a weirdo by many, and more than capable of coming up with his own gadgets and devices, whereas here, he plays a wider role in the Shared Universe from the start, having his suits and gadgets designed by Tony Stark (though Peter still creates his own web fluid, and the suit that Tony makes is basically an upgrade on technology that Peter himself already invented) as a teenagernote . The greater integration in the shared universe mirrors the Ultimate version, where Peter served as a Morality Pet to Nick Fury, who often had Anger Born of Worry and sent mixed messages, and where several of Peter's enemies (such as Ultimate Osborn) were anti-Fury.
    • Homecoming and the upcoming films focus on Spider-Man as a teenage adventurer, befitting the Ultimate Spider-Man (whose 200-plus run ended without him graduating high school, while 616 Peter graduated in Issue 30). Early Peter Parker in the Steve Ditko era had a Friendless Background (and even after he found friends in the Romita years when he went to college, he never really had any real confidants to share his secret identity). In Ultimate comics, Mary Jane was made into his childhood best friend with whom he shared his identity early in his career, a role given in the MCU to Fat Best Friend Ned. The result is a far less hostile social life.
    • The film's biggest change is the Setting Update, which is far more comprehensive than even the Ultimate run (which brought in more than a few Grandfather Clausenote ). Ned is more or less a Canon Foreigner who owes far more to Miles Morales's Ganke, Liz Allan is Promoted to Love Interestnote  and given a Race Lift, Flash Thompson is Peter's intellectual rival instead of a Jerk Jock, and Michelle may or may not be poised to become an alternate-universe Mary Jane Watson. Many of these seem to be done to distinguish them from the two previous series as well as highlight the sociological changes in contemporary teen culture and the logistics of Peter going to a magnet school.
  • Underling with an F in PR: Played for Drama: Adrian Toomes/The Vulture sets up an underground arms dealing ring. One of his coworkers, Jackson Brice, foolishly draws attention to the organization by demonstrating their weapons out in the open, getting Spider-Man on their case. Adrian is furious at him, but Jackson doesn't change his stubborn, loose-cannon ways, and it ends up getting him killed.
    Adrian: How many times have I told you not to fire them out in the open?
    Jackson: Hey, you said "move the merchandise."
    Adrian: Under the radar! Under the radar! That's how we survive!
  • Understatement: In the flashback to the time shortly before the airport battle, Peter finds a gift from Tony that contains his new costume. He said that he made a minor upgrade (from the "sweatsuit" costume). Proven even more of an understatement when Peter hacks the suit to remove the training restrictions, finding a ton of further upgrades. Later on, Tony outright tells him it's a multimillion-dollar piece of hardware.
  • Ungrateful Bastard: Averted for Toomes twice; first when he gives Peter an out because the latter saved his daughter Liz's life. Second when he goes to prison and meets up with Gargan, who notes that more than a few of his friends want Spider-Man dead as he plots an escape. Gargan says that there is a rumor that Toomes knows who is under the mask. Because Peter saved his life, Toomes lies and says he doesn't. However, it's possibly played straight in the ferry scene, assuming that Toomes already knew that Spider-Man had saved his daughter (even if Peter and the audience didn't yet) and didn't hold back at the time.
  • The Unpronounceable: Happy Hogan quickly gives up trying to pronounce "Megingjörð", instead just calling it "Thor's magic belt".
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
    • Aunt May does not visibly react when she catches Peter standing next to Ned in his bedroom wearing nothing but underwear. All she does is suggest "Maybe put on some clothes" as she leaves.
    • No-one seems to notice Spider-Man running through Washington, DC on his way to the Washington Monument. His fame has apparently not penetrated far outside of New York City.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: During Peter's very awkward car ride with Liz and Toomes, Liz comments on how Peter is "coincidentally" missing just about every time Spider-Man shows up. Toomes is already suspicious due to feeling that Peter's voice is familiar and this provides the connection needed to prove to him that Peter is Spider-Man.
  • Vanity License Plate: Flash's car has the license plate of "FLASHDRV", i.e. "Flash Drive."
  • Villain Has a Point: When the government agency "Damage Control" took over Toomes' contract and forced him off the cleanup site, they inflicted financial hardship on him and jeopardized his ability to support his family. Toomes points out to Peter that he's young and doesn't understand that the "rich and powerful, they do whatever they want" and just don't care about "guys like us". He even points out that Tony Stark himself first made his fortune as a weapons manufacturer and ultimately claims that everything he has done has been to secure his family's future. Peter, driven by his high moral standards points that selling weapons to criminals is still wrong and while he doesn't relent in stopping Toomes' plans, it does appear some part of what he said resonated with Peter as reflected in his decision to turn down Stark's offer to join the Avengers and remain someone "to look out for the little guy".
  • "The Villain Knows" Moment: There's a scene where Adrian Toomes, a.k.a. the Vulture, learns that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, shown in a "Eureka!" Moment. Shortly afterwards, he has his daughter Liz Allen get out of the car so that he can give Peter "the dad talk". This is where he reveals that he's figured it out and offers to spare Peter and his loved ones as gratitude for saving Liz, but only if he stays out of his way.
  • Villain Opening Scene: The movie begins with Adrian Toomes/the Vulture's origin.
  • Villain Over for Dinner: Inverted. Peter goes to Liz's house to pick her up for the homecoming dance and blunders right into the revelation that Adrian Toomes is her father, leading to an extremely awkward moment where Peter is practically wetting himself in fear of the oblivious Toomes while Liz is getting ready.
  • Villain Respect: Toomes offers Spider-Man his thanks for saving his daughter at the Washington Monument, going so far as to say he'll spare his life in return. In addition, he says he admires Spider-Man's "grit" and determination. In all, he seems to have no personal emnity toward Spider-Man himself and actually likes Peter; he only tries to kill him because Spider-Man is interfering with his plans. In the end, he refuses to reveal Spider-Man's identity because it's Nothing Personal.
  • Villains Out Shopping: Peter finds Aaron Davis while he's loading groceries into his car. When Peter leaves him tied to the car by webbing, Aaron complains that he has ice cream melting in his trunk.
  • Visual Pun:
    • The first trailer has a very apropos cut:
      Peter: I'm really sorry. I'm so busy, I'm slammed...
      [cut to Spider-Man being slammed into a school bus]
    • The first trailer also has Tony Stark's voice-over saying "Stay close to the ground," just as we see Spider-Man climbing to the top of the Washington Monument.
    • There's also the "Identity theft? We have you covered." ad in the bank that's being robbed by "The Avengers". Spider-Man is the go-to guy you call to deal with superhero impersonators.
    • Peter uses a webshooter to shoot a tracker at one of Vulture's goons. It's basically a tiny robot spider that crawls into the guy's clothes. In other words, he bugged them.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection:
    • Karen is the voice inside Peter's Stark suit.
    • Discussed with Ned, who loves the idea of becoming this to Peter and helping him out by being the "Guy in the chair" and begs Peter to let him do that. At the end of the film, when Peter has no access to Karen, Ned gets his wish.
  • Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World: The movie puts emphasis on Peter's teenage life and how his superhero activities affect it.
  • Wham Line:
    • During the ferry scene, Peter rapidly tries to hold the boat together by running weblines between structural strongpoints. Then Karen says "Well done, Peter. You were 98% successful." Turns out he missed the last one, and the boat falls apart anyway.
    • Three simple words from the Vulture that change everything for Peter: "I'm Liz's dad."
    • "My friends call me MJ."
  • Wham Shot:
    • May has dropped Peter off at Liz's house so he can pick her up for homecoming. He goes to the door, and who should answer it but Adrian Toomes.
    • The very last scene of the film: Peter gets his costume back from Tony, and puts it on... not realizing that Aunt May is right behind him as he does so.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Phineas Mason (The Tinkerer) is still at large by the end credits, being the only one of Toomes' goons to escape arrest. Worse yet, Spidey doesn't know that he even exists as they have never met face-to-face.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Tony demands the suit he made for Peter back after Peter tries to stop the Vulture on his own and an entire ship gets destroyed.
  • What You Are in the Dark: After Stark takes Peter's tech-suit away, essentially grounding him as Spider-Man, and Toomes discovers Peter's dual identity, he gives Peter an ultimatum outside of Homecoming: walk away from being Spider-Man and Peter lives, or take on the Vulture and die. When Peter ultimately chooses to go after him, he dons his homemade suit and goes after him. After bringing down a plane to stop Toomes, he then tries to save him from a malfunctioning exosuit, and when that fails, runs into the burning wreck to carry Toomes out. This strong moral character is rewarded by Toomes, who keeps Spider-Man's identity a secret from both law enforcement and criminals alike.
  • White-and-Grey Morality: The film has plenty of antagonists: Big Bad Adrian Toomes, Call Blocker Tony Stark, and the indifferent system of high school (teachers, Flash Thompson, etc.). That said, none are actively malicious: Toomes, an arms dealer, is A Father to His Men and to his family; Stark has (completely reasonable) concerns about letting a 14-year-old have superpowers; and the teachers are doing their job. As befitting the tone, almost Everybody Lives, with the only on-screen fatality being one of Toomes' subordinates who gets out of line.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Wouldn't be Spider-Man without it, but here it's presented in a very different way from the usual. When Peter almost gets an entire ship-full of people killed and says he's nothing without the suit, Tony points out that if he needs the suit to be a superhero and good person, then he shouldn't have it to begin with. Peter Parker is far more than just Spider-Man and upgraded tech, as Tony himself had to learn in past films.
  • Wolverine Publicity: Tony Stark is featured heavily in the marketing, having the most lines and screen time after Peter Parker himself in the trailers. Interestingly, Spider-Man is a well-known and well-loved character (once being the "Wolverine" in "Wolverine Publicity" himself), so this seems less to boost the character's popularity and more to let even the most casual movie-goer know this is Spider-Man in the MCU proper, not "just" another reboot.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Downplayed. Toomes is willing to beat the shit out of Peter... but not kill him.
  • Working-Class Hero:
    • Tony Stark patronizingly invokes this when Spider-Man states at the end that he wants to be close to the ground, saying it's a Bruce Springsteen kind of gesture.
    • Toomes also clearly sees himself as one, being a lifelong law-abiding citizen who tried to build The American Dream for his family only for the government to shut his operation and then mock his aspirations while doing so, sneering more or less that he should have known his place. Despite being an antagonist, he looks after his employees, and sees himself as a "little guy" against the system.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math:
    • The timeline for the film is messed up within the opening scenes. The film opens with Toomes and his crew cleaning up the fallout from the Battle of New York (generally thought until now to occur in 2012note ), after the May 2011 Stark Expo (as seen in "Fury's Big Week"). Despite this, the film repeatedly states it is set eight years after The Avengers. This is impossible, as Homecoming begins two months after Captain America: Civil War (2016, four years after the Battle of New York); but in that movie Vision makes a reference to Tony Stark revealing himself as Iron Man to the world eight years ago, even though Iron Man, despite being released in 2008, has been understood to take place in either 2009 or 2010. The alternative is that the Phase One movies have retroactively been pushed further back in time than previously stated, so either way there are inconsistencies.
    • When Peter is in detention watching the video with Captain America, the latter mentions having been frozen for 65 years. However it was 1945 when he got frozen and 2011 when S.H.I.E.L.D. found him in and unfroze him. Which would make it 66 years. It's entirely possible that he was simply rounding.
  • Xanatos Gambit: A small one. At the end, when he drops Peter and Liz off at the dance, Toomes tells Peter to back off or "I'll kill you. I'll kill everyone you love." However, he also calls in Shocker to watch the back door and kill Peter if he makes the wrong choice.
  • You Have Failed Me: After having enough of Shocker's repeated disregard for his instructions and lack of respect Toomes kicks him off the crew, and vaporizes him with a ray gun. Downplayed, as it's revealed immediately afterwards that Toomes mistook the gun for a harmless anti-grav device and didn't intend to kill him.
  • Younger and Hipper:
    • While Peter Parker has been portrayed as a teenager in prior films, this is the first time he's actually being played by one; Tom Holland had just turned nineteen when he was cast in the role. Peter is fifteen and in tenth grade when the movie starts, which means that he's younger than either of the previous cinematic incarnations of the character (who were both introduced as being in twelfth grade).
    • Marisa Tomei plays a very youthful Aunt May, even if she's reasonably age-appropriate for the role as a fifty-something woman. Appropriately enough, people are very aware of how gorgeous she is. Inappropriately enough, they won't stop talking about it in front of Peter.
"Hi, I'm Captain America, here to talk to you about one of the most valuable traits a soldier or student can have: patience. Sometimes, patience is the key to victory. Sometimes, it leads to very little, and it seems like it's not worth it. And you wonder... why you waited so long for something so disappointing... How many more of these?"

 
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Vulture Learns SpiderM's ID

Adrian Toomes, aka The Vulture, realizes his daughter's prom date, Peter, is actually Spider-Man.

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Vulture Learns SpiderM's ID

Adrian Toomes, aka The Vulture, realizes his daughter's prom date, Peter, is actually Spider-Man.

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