The Biggest Problem with Spider-Man: Far From Home? Peter Is Too Passive [Podcast]
Peter Parker spends this entire movie trying to run away from being Spider-Man — and honestly, who could blame him? But that avoidance is exactly what's holding the story back. In this episode of Kinolime Fix It, Meara breaks down why Spider-Man: Far From Home — the awkward middle child sandwiched between Homecoming and No Way Home — never quite finds its footing, and it all traces back to one screenwriting fundamental: the gap between what a character wants and what they actually need.
Using his 994-issue deep dive into The Amazing Spider-Man as a backdrop, Meara diagnoses exactly where Peter's arc goes soft, why reactive protagonists aren't automatically weak ones (see: Ripley, Marty McFly, Max Rockatansky), and how a single structural fix — making Peter choose his replacement instead of having Nick Fury hand him one — could have transformed Quentin Beck's betrayal from a plot twist into a gut punch. She even rewrites the synopsis to prove it.
If you've ever wondered why some heroes feel like they're driving the story and others feel like they're just along for the ride, this one's for you.
Full Transcript: Kinolime Fix ItEpisode 5: The Biggest Problem with Spider-Man: Far From Home? Peter Is Too Passive
Participants
Meara Owen-Griffiths - Creative Executive, Kinolime
Meara: This summer, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is becoming the fourth entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Spider-Man chronology. I could make a pretty strong argument that some of Tom Holland's web-slinging is the greatest we've ever had. But that's not to say it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Today I want to look at the awkward middle child of the trilogy: Spider-Man: Far From Home. It's a pretty confusing naming scheme — we've got Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home, and now Brand New Day.
I love Spidey. As of the time of recording this video, I've read all 994 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. This is my oldest issue — it's issue 316, from 1989, I believe. I enjoy a superhero movie, but as a screenwriter myself, I always want to look at things and ask, "How could this be better?" And I can't shake the feeling that Spider-Man: Far From Home leaves something to be desired.
Whether you're a writer yourself, or you're just trying to understand story better, let's look today at why some protagonists command an audience while others feel strangely passive. I'd bet it usually comes down to one thing: how their want and their need interact. Get this wrong, and no amount of great dialogue or flashy VFX will save your story.
I'm Meara, and welcome to Kinolime Fix It.
Want vs. Need: The Core Framework
Meara: Far From Home is the only Spider-Man film where Peter Parker is actively trying not to be Spider-Man. He's running from that responsibility — you know, the one that comes with great power, yada yada, you know the rest. He's looking for any excuse to hang up the red and blue spandex.
A character's want is the superficial, surface-level desire driving their actions at the start of a story. It's often misguided, but it's what propels the plot. A need, on the other hand, is loftier — an internal or emotional truth that resolves the character's arc. It's usually tied to identity, belonging, or moral clarity: a spiritual or thematic truth the character rarely recognizes until an epiphany means the need eclipses the want.
In Homecoming, Peter wants prestige. He wants to be an Avenger, to impress Tony Stark, to prove he's bigger than just Queens, and eventually to win over his love interest, Liz. He eventually learns that helping ordinary people without recognition or reward is far more meaningful than chasing accolades. Tony puts it rather bluntly: "If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it."
Great drama often occurs when want and need are in direct conflict, and Homecoming thrives there — Peter cannot pursue the deeper truth of his need without sacrificing the recognition he craves.
Far From Home immediately flips that equation. Peter's want is defined by a negative objective instead: "I just want to be Peter Parker for a while." It's a desire built on inaction rather than action. Instead of embracing the friendly-neighborhood ethos he learned in Homecoming, he's trying to step away from it.
So what's Peter's need this time? The thesis of the film is that it shouldn't be Peter's responsibility to identify or fulfill a successor role for Iron Man — being Spider-Man is enough. But unlike in Homecoming, his want and need never collide. They're just parallel. Worse, they're both largely internal. Our web-head isn't pursuing a tangible objective that forces him to confront a truth. There are plenty of distractions and temptations dangled in front of him, sure, but nothing with the same dramatic friction that made Homecoming compelling.
The Reactive Protagonist Problem
Meara: There are three major categories of protagonist: active, passive, or reactive. Peter doesn't fall cleanly into any one camp — he's got a foot in each, and a third foot somewhere for good measure. As a result, the story lacks the impact that fully committing to one of these modes could have.
By and large, Peter is a reactive protagonist. That's not automatically a weakness — as you'll often hear in screenwriting circles, reactive doesn't mean poor. Look at Ellen Ripley in Alien, Marty McFly in Back to the Future, or Max in Mad Max: Fury Road. These characters react to plot rather than directly initiating it, and it works.
Peter isn't entirely reactive, to be fair — he does drive the plot forward. But count how many times his response amounts to, "Whoa, how did I just do that? That's awesome!" His saving grace is the moment he willingly hands Edith, Tony's drone-strike system, over to Beck at the midpoint — a decision that shapes the entire third act. On paper, that's exactly what a midpoint should be: bold, character-driven, structurally decisive. Yet it doesn't land with the weight it should, because the choice is grounded in an apathetic want rather than a burning need.
Worth revisiting here is the oddly cursory "next Tony Stark" angle. The film repeatedly insists the world is searching for a successor to fill Tony's absence, but this expectation is never meaningfully grounded in Peter's own perspective — it's projected onto him by external voices that don't connect to his immediate emotional reality. Does it ever really feel like something Peter is personally concerned with? So the question becomes: what exactly is Peter's growth, if the endpoint just mirrors where he started?
A Proposed Rewrite
Meara: I want to propose an alternate structure — one that keeps Peter's desire to pursue MJ intact, but puts him through the same fundamental lesson Tony Stark learned in Homecoming: responsibility cannot be delegated.
After everything Peter has endured — including being erased from existence for five years — he should be living in a state of hypervigilance, convinced that letting his guard down for even a moment risks people getting hurt. His want shouldn't be taking a break; it should be never taking a day off, making sure nobody gets hurt on his watch. Like Tony, he overcorrects, convinced every problem is his to solve. He's exhausted and constantly on edge, patrolling night after night instead of sleeping. His grades slip, his relationships stagnate, life passes him by while he's busy trying to save everybody else.
Someone who cares about him — let's say Aunt May or Ned — recognizes the toll this is taking and insists he needs a real break. Making it May adds a comedic layer, since Peter is already trying to play matchmaker (or gatekeeper) for her and Happy while he's away, giving him an extra reason to be suspicious once he's gone.
Peter books the trip but can't shake his anxiety. He refuses to leave the suit behind, wearing it under his clothes despite the European heatwave — a sweaty mess at all times. He can't truly experience Europe the way his peers can, because his mind is elsewhere. This smoothly sets up his need: that being Spider-Man and doing his best is all he can ask of himself. It's a satisfying role reversal — this time, May is the one insisting on Peter's warnings, flipping the dynamic from the first film.
It feels strange to set a Spidey movie outside New York, and everybody knows it — so let's not lose that setting entirely. Rather than abandoning it, let's keep checking back in, making Queens a constant presence in Peter's mind. As we wander Europe's cobbled streets and canals with him, we're also wondering: what's happening back home? Is Aunt May okay? What about Delmar's bodega cat?
That anxiety is why Peter only agrees to the trip on one condition: he needs somebody to watch over Queens and New York in his absence.
Enter Beck — A Different Introduction
Meara: Instead of being introduced to Peter by Nick Fury — an authority Peter would never doubt — Beck should be someone Peter uncovers: a local, scrappy, minor-league hero who stepped up during the Blip to fill the vacuum left by Peter and the other heroes. Peter reaches out because Tony instilled the value of mentorship and delegation in him.
Beck adopts a hero moniker — for the sake of clarity, I'll model him on Darkhawk, another Queens-based character. We're introduced to Darkhawk not as a front for Quentin Beck (who anyone familiar with the comics knows becomes a villain), but as a genuine, anonymous do-gooder. Peter voluntarily appoints Beck as his replacement, telling himself Darkhawk can hold down New York during his absence.
Unbeknownst to Peter, Beck is now playing two roles: Darkhawk, physically active in Queens, and the CG-illusion Mysterio, traipsing around Europe. This makes the eventual reveal that Beck is Mysterio more surprising — he can't be in two places at once, we assume, so we never suspect that, in a sense, he was.
Beck's dual role now works on two levels: he's using misdirection and sleight of hand to keep Peter distracted (a nod to his magician origins), and the longer he keeps Peter away, the tighter his grip on New York becomes.
How Peter Uncovers the Deception
Meara: Peter's discovery should come from his own initiative. Eager to improve as a hero and reduce collateral damage, he asks Ned to film the elemental encounters so they can review and study Mysterio's tactics — this also lets Ned keep his "guy in the chair" role. From there, they start spotting inconsistencies: a bird passing through solid matter, visual glitches in the environment, small continuity errors in the illusions.
It's essential that Peter is active in uncovering this ruse — it can't simply fall into his lap. That way, the blame for Beck's eventual villainous reveal falls entirely on Peter. He's the one who introduces him, trusts him, and fails to spot the warning signs. This isn't a shared institutional failure alongside Fury and Hill — it's personal. Peter's idea, therefore Peter's mistake.
From Beck's perspective, he doesn't need to convince S.H.I.E.L.D., the media, or the world at large of his elaborate false narrative. He only needs to endear himself to a grieving kid who's already desperate to hand over control. That's a far more believable path to power than the film's current version, where Beck's meteoric rise depends on never running into anyone smart enough to see through the facade. He's not already inside the system climbing the ranks — he's on the outside, trying to get noticed by it at all.
I'd also have Peter drive the rerouting of the tour, following the elementals' trail himself rather than letting Fury handle everything. This is difficult, and it requires sacrifices — like giving up his Eiffel Tower moment with MJ — to accommodate saving the world. It also puts him in difficult positions where he has to endanger his friends by leading them into danger. This forces Peter into hard choices, but it also forces him to be proactive. Without S.H.I.E.L.D.'s resources, the hoops he has to jump through get exponentially tighter, and he's caught in lie after lie, hitting frequent crossroads: do I prioritize my want, or my need?
The Darkhawk Subplot Back Home
Meara: Meanwhile, Beck-as-Darkhawk is making inroads in Queens, stealing technology to improve his illusions and further his goals. We already have the perfect POV for this: Aunt May, doing community work to help the Blip's displaced victims — the ideal vantage point to see the effects of this new "hero" making things worse.
People on the margins of society are either weaponized as staged villains for Darkhawk to "defeat," or recruited to facilitate the tech thefts. What looks like a rising local hero from Peter's distant perspective starts to feel predatory up close. Darkhawk appears hyper-competent by design, but he's actually a net negative — it looks good for the news and social media, but on the streets, people feel the effects trickle down once Spidey's gone.
This gives May something to investigate, and gives us the chance to learn more about her — endearing her to us further before she's killed off in the third movie. (Spoiler alert.)
Meanwhile, someone like J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle can spin Darkhawk as a more effective local hero than Spider-Man ever was, feeding a conspiracy theory that Spidey was actually the problem all along. This disillusions Peter, feeding into the "I'll never be good enough" subplot that's already present — and gives us a more fleshed-out reason for why the public turns on Spider-Man, tying more cleanly into the film's post-credits scene.
Act Two and the Reveal
Meara: During Act Two, Peter can slowly let his guard down, learning to enjoy himself and focus on things beyond heroism. As his trip is extended by disruptions, he sees that Queens is actually prospering without him — maybe he even starts to feel that Europe needs him more, since he's taking down apocalyptic threats there instead of petty crime back home. When it seems Darkhawk is better suited to street-level work than Spidey ever was, Peter hands over the Edith system — blinded by his want, not yet understanding his need.
It's only once we learn that Darkhawk and Mysterio are both Beck that Peter is forced into a paradigm shift. To bridge the gap between the two identities, May and Happy uncover cryptic casting-call auditions for Beck's "villains" — an Easter egg nodding to Mysterio's comic-book origins, playing out something like Robert Downey Jr.'s audition tape in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Peter's discovery now directly corresponds to the technology going missing back in New York.
Peter gets what he originally wanted when he hands Edith to Beck — but it isn't what he needed, so he's never at peace. Pursuing his need means protecting his own corner of the world. Ultimately, Peter returns home, defeats Beck, and accepts that New York is his responsibility, and that his best is all he can offer. He may not be the perfect hero, but he is enough.
Revised Synopsis
Meara: So, what do you think of these changes? Here's a revised synopsis incorporating them:
Exhausted by the grueling demands of being Spider-Man, Peter Parker appoints friendly neighborhood hero Darkhawk to watch over Queens while he enjoys a summer-school Euro trip. He plans to confess his feelings to MJ and experience a normal teenage adventure. Balancing the two proves difficult when his holiday is interrupted by a series of devastating attacks from mysterious elemental creatures. He teams up with the charismatic Mysterio, a magician with the knowledge to defeat them.
Back home, Darkhawk is proficiently dispatching escalating threats and endearing himself to the media — but Aunt May is noticing discrepancies from the ground level. Feeling inferior and incapable of carrying on Iron Man's legacy, Peter considers hanging up the mask as his vacation derails and his chances at romance seem dashed. But when he and his friends uncover Mysterio's deception — that he and Darkhawk are one and the same — Peter must confront his insecurities, reclaim his mantle as a hero, and take back responsibility as the protector of Queens. He has to accept that he can't save everybody, and that without the right work-life balance, he'll only burn himself out.
Closing Thoughts
Meara: I believe these amendments give Peter a more balanced character arc, a stronger third-act synthesis, and more obstacles to overcome. He still wants all the same things, but now he's conflicted by his growing responsibilities, instead of just trying to run from them.
As I said up top, I like this film, and I like this screenplay — but everything can always be improved. For any screenwriters watching at home: never settle for "this will do" or "this is good enough." Strive to always make things the best version they can be.
I hope this lesson on want versus need is useful for you in your own writing, and that it encourages you to assess how your character balances their objectives.
Alright, I've been Meara — thank you for watching, and until next time, Kinolimers, see you later.
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