'Spider-Man: Homecoming': Tom Holland Wants New Peter Parker to Be His Generation's Marty McFly
The team behind Spider-Man: Homecoming has long discussed how they approached July’s reboot of the Peter Parker origin story like a John Hughes teen comedy. Director Jon Watts and star Tom Holland told Yahoo Movies about their neo-classic inspirations last year at San Diego Comic-Con, and during a Facebook Live interview with us last week, Holland rattled off a number of titles Watts had suggested he screen before filming: Pretty in Pink, Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
The only entry in that batch not written or directed by Hughes was Back to the Future, but it is the one that appears to have resonated the deepest with Holland.
“My goal was to try and kind of be our generation’s Marty McFly,” Holland said of the vest-sporting time traveler so memorably portrayed by Michael J. Fox in the 1985 favorite and its two sequels. “That was what my all-time goal was.”
And like Back to the Future brought heart and charisma to a story that transcended its spiffy sci-fi bells and whistles, Holland is hoping Homecoming will have the same effect.
“I think one of the best things about this movie is if you stripped away all the Spider-Man scenes, there’s a really solid movie there without the superhero aspect, about Peter growing up, going to school, struggling,” he said. “So it’s a nice balance between superhero and kid at high school.”
Spider-Man Homecoming opens July 7.
Watch Tom Holland talk about how Chris Hemsworth helped him land the Spider-Man role:
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