Spider-Man 2's storyline of Peter Parker's powers failing took a very different turn in Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Following 2002's Spider-Man, 2004's Spider-Man 2 saw Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) struggling to balance his life as a superhero with his college life and romance with Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). With Peter's web-slinging heroics forcing him to constantly make sacrifices in his personal life, Peter's powers began to switch off randomly, right as Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) became New York's newest supervillain.
It was implied that his problems were born from stress and depression related to the impact his superhero career had on his personal life. Though the exact cause was never fully explained, Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker himself would later attribute it to an "existential crisis" to his fellow Spideys in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Interestingly, this storyline had already played out onscreen, albeit not in live-action. Specifically, it happened in the 1990s cartoon, Spider-Man: The Animated Series. But instead of this version of Peter simply overcoming the issue, the problem served as setup for a rather sinister twist.
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