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There are more Spider-Man movies than you think, and most of them might take place in the same universe.

Mass audiences may see a certain string of high-profile, well-moneyed, live-action Spider-Man films -- that is, the ones released from 2002 until 2022 -- as the only "official" ones, largely because of how much media exposure they got. In that span, there were five separate notable Spider-Man continuities, but those continuities became a little bit chummy as time passed. Eventually, at least three of those continuities would cross over with one another. These kinds of crossovers, however, are easy for Spider-Man fans to accept, as parallel universes have been a common feature in Spider-Man comics going back many decades.

Also, Spider-Man appeared in so many animated shows and movies over the years that it took no major mental calisthenics to imagine each version existing in its own world. Spider-Man gets rebooted all the time,...

It's easy to forget, what with all the recent hype about it, but as far as movies are concerned the concept of a "multiverse" is anything but new. Gwyneth Paltrow was starring in rom-coms about alternate realities 25 years ago, with the groundbreaking "Sliding Doors," and just a few years later Jet Li tried to kill every other version of himself across alternate realities in the action-thriller "The One."

But a few things have certainly changed. Audiences seem to grasp the concept pretty clearly now — making weird and complex films that would have probably struggled to find mainstream acceptance years ago into massive Oscar-winning crossover hits — and so do motion picture studios. Thanks to multiverses, studios can now create movies and shows where every iteration of their intellectual property can exist simultaneously, making the nostalgic seem new and the fan service seem poignant.

And for whatever reason, the focal point of...