A teenager from Queens with abilities he did not ask for and an adult mentor he did not need, trying to do a small job well while much larger ones keep landing on him.
Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider in 2015 and starts stopping bike thefts in Queens, and the story stays that size for as long as it can. That is the design of the character in this continuity. He is a local hero in a franchise about global ones, and every time he gets promoted the films are careful to show what it costs him.
The version of him introduced here is unusually young and unusually supervised. Tony Stark recruits him out of high school for a fight between adults, gives him equipment he did not build, and then spends two films withholding the approval he keeps asking for. That relationship is the spine of the first half of his arc, and it is also, on rewatch, quite hard to defend.
What he has instead of a philosophy is a habit. He goes back. He goes back into the building, back after the man who has just tried to kill him, back for the people who ruined his life, and the films treat that reflex as the actual power, which is why the suit keeps getting taken off him and it keeps not mattering.
Show detailsThe origin you never see
This Spider-Man arrives fully formed. There is no radioactive spider on screen, no wrestling match, no death of Uncle Ben. Ben has already died when we meet Peter, and May is raising him alone. The films refer to it and never dramatise it.
That decision is why the character can be introduced in the middle of somebody else’s film, and it is also why his motivation has to be carried entirely by performance rather than by a scene everyone in the audience already knew was coming.
Show detailsThe cameo that was decided afterwards
Iron Man 2 has a scene in which a boy in a child’s Iron Man mask is targeted by Justin Hammer’s drones and saved by Stark. The boy is played by Max Favreau, the director’s son. In 2017 Jon Watts, who directed Homecoming, said he had suggested to Kevin Feige that the child be retroactively established as a young Peter, and Tom Holland supported the idea. Wikipedia lists the film among his appearances on that basis, and so does this catalogue, with the same caveat the source gives: no film or series has yet confirmed it. Six years before he was recruited, then, and only if you accept the retcon.
Major spoiler
The spell that was supposed to hide his identity ends up erasing him instead. Everyone who ever knew Peter Parker forgets that he exists, including MJ and Ned, and he lets it happen because there is no version of the fix that keeps them. May is already dead by then.