Spider-Man vs Doc Ock: who should have won in No Way Home?

Before Spider-Man: No Way Home arrived on December 17, 2021, I set up a matchup that everyone could see coming: the MCU's Spider-Man against Doctor Octopus. My verdict was clear. Based on everything Peter Parker had done on screen up to that point, I thought Spider-Man should win, even if I couldn't say whether he would win in the film itself.

The question then was simple: who should win, judged only on what each of them had already shown? I wasn't trying to predict the movie. There was too much else at play for that.

Why Doc Ock was the No Way Home villain everyone was watching

As excitement built for No Way Home, the villain we had seen the most of was Doctor Octopus. Green Goblin, Electro and Lizard had all been glimpsed too, but most of the footage people were talking about came from the bridge scene. That told us that at some point in the movie, Spider-Man and Doc Ock were going to fight, at least for a little while.

Even so, I suspected that asking who would win in the film might be the wrong question. Green Goblin looked like he was in there somehow, and maybe the rest of the Sinister Six would show up too. There's always that moment where the villains team up, catch Spider-Man by surprise and beat him down, and I thought that might happen here as well. So this was never my prediction for the movie. It was about who should win, looking at their track records.

Spider-Man's strength in the MCU is consistently high

Right out of the gate, I felt Spider-Man was undersold when it came to strength. He has been consistent, and consistently at a high level, but people keep trying to undersell him. Quit sleeping on Pete.

In Captain America: Civil War, he effortlessly caught the Winter Soldier's arm and overpowered him. It was said that he caught a car moving 40 miles per hour and brought it to a dead stop. He also rocked Giant-Man with a punch. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, he kicked through four inch ballistic glass, broke through steel doors, and lifted a massive weight that trapped him when a ceiling collapsed. He picked up and threw cars, and he has the grip strength to hang on to jets and planes in flight.

Probably the most impressive feat was holding a Staten Island Ferry together as it split apart and sank, even though that was partly his fault. Those ferries can weigh somewhere in the range of 2,500 to 3,500 tons. I'm not saying Peter lifted thousands of tons; Iron Man helped out a lot, and he was the one who saved the ship. Still, Peter was impressive there.

In Avengers: Infinity War, he stopped a blow from Cull Obsidian with the palm of his hand, threw a car at him, and even staggered Thanos with his punches. In Avengers: Endgame, he stopped Cull Obsidian again and pulled him back. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, he lifted a car about a hundred feet into the air with one hand and held up a big part of a bell tower for a good solid minute. Tell me Spider-Man isn't strong, and I won't believe you.

Doc Ock has already proven he can hurt a Spider-Man

The problem for Peter was that Doc Ock had already proven he's strong enough to fight a Spider-Man. He has hit the other Peter he fought and sent him sailing across a room, and he punched him through train cars.

If Doc could do that to the other Spider-Man, I figured he should be able to do it to this one too. We had already seen him do it in the trailers.

Peter Parker is the tougher fighter

Flip the script and ask how tough Spider-Man is. Peter can take a hit. He took multiple punches from the Shocker, punches powerful enough to send him flying through a school bus and flip another bus over. He was tossed around by Cull Obsidian, someone roughly on par with the Hulkbuster armor, and he took attacks from Thanos, including being slammed to the ground.

He has had buildings crash down all around him, taken massive falls from way up in the sky, and survived an airplane crash. In Far From Home he was hit by a speeding train and didn't die. He even recovered quickly, considering he had just been hit by a train. That meant Doc Ock's strategy of crashing a train might not work out this time.

Doc, on the other hand, is still just a human, at least sporadically. Whoever wrote his movie was playing fast and loose with his durability. On one hand, he gets dazed and confused when Aunt May hits him on the head. On the other, he takes straight up beatings from Spider-Man and brushes them off like it's no big deal. It's hard to land on exactly how tough he is, but it's safe to say Spider-Man is the tougher of the two.

Speed, agility and the spider sense favor Spider-Man

It's just as safe to say Spider-Man is faster. Speed and agility are his bread and butter. He has dodged attacks from Falcon, Vulture, Scarlet Witch, Winter Soldier and Star-Lord, and in Far From Home he dodged automatic gunfire from countless drones coming at him from all directions. In short, I called him easily the most agile character in the whole MCU.

That gets more impressive once you add his spider sense. Although Peter is still fairly new to his powers, the sense is well developed. He used it to see through illusions and take down 10 to 15 drones with his eyes closed. He even dodged a point blank bullet he couldn't see coming, at a moment when he couldn't trust any of his other senses.

I can't say the same about Doc Ock. To be fair, he is fast enough to tag and catch a Spider-Man, and he did it to the other Peter a surprising number of times. That can't be too surprising, though, because a movie where the villain can't even touch the hero would be boring. He did it before, and we had already seen it play out with this Spider-Man too.

My verdict: Spider-Man should beat Doctor Octopus

Spider-Man is stronger, tougher, faster and more agile. I didn't think Doc Ock and his tentacles were enough to beat him. Give him a good fight, sure. "Push him to his limits maybe, but beat him, actually beat him? Nah, I don't see it."

If anything, I bet this Pete could beat Doc Ock more easily than the other Pete did. For starters, he doesn't have any relationship with Doc. He isn't emotionally invested in trying to save him, so he wouldn't be pulling his punches to the same extent. He also has way better, way more versatile web shooters, which I was sure would come in handy.

I hadn't seen the film, so I wasn't claiming he would win in No Way Home. But on everything shown up to that point, Spider-Man should win this fight.