Jon Watts
Jon Watts is a director, born 1981.
Jon Watts came up directing episodes of the parody news series Onion News Network and music videos for Fatboy Slim and Swedish House Mafia. His first two features were small and mean: Clown in 2014, a horror film about a costume that will not come off, and Cop Car in 2015, in which two boys steal an unattended police cruiser and the sheriff comes looking for it.
Cop Car is the reason he got Spider-Man. It is a lean thriller with about six characters, it never explains more than it has to, and it is genuinely tense, which suggested he could handle scale without losing shape. Marvel hired him for Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017 and he delivered the smallest Marvel film in years: a high school movie whose villain is a salvage contractor with a grudge and whose hero's main problem is getting home before curfew.
The trilogy then got progressively bigger and progressively less his. Far From Home in 2019 is a competent holiday-abroad comedy with one strong gimmick at its centre. No Way Home in 2021 made an enormous amount of money and functions more as corporate curation than as a film with a director's fingerprints on it. Since then he has made Wolfs, a star-driven crime comedy, in 2024, and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew for television, which is his Amblin instincts turned loose on a Lucasfilm budget. The open question about Watts is whether the miniaturist who made Cop Car is still in there.
Movies (9)
TV (1)
Where to start with Jon Watts
Skip the obvious order. Cop Car first, because it tells you who he is: small, patient, nasty in a controlled way, and over before it outstays itself.
Then Spider-Man: Homecoming, the best of the three Marvel films and the one where the low-budget instincts survive contact with the machine. Spider-Man: Far From Home is the fun one and Spider-Man: No Way Home is the event; if you only watch one, make it the former, because the latter is engineered for people who have already done twenty years of homework. Clown is for horror completists and nobody else. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is the recent surprise, a children's adventure series with real teeth. Wolfs is the one to leave until last.