As we’ve seen in Spider-Man: Far From Home and Into the Spider-Verse, your Peter Parker is but one Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in a multiverse of multiple possible Wall-Crawling Webheads. Much like the Pacific Ocean, the multiverse is a warm place with no memory, which means that, according to a popular theory on Reddit, it is more than likely that in one of these universes, Spider-Man and The Shawshank Redemption’s Andy Dufresne exist at the same time and place.
As MrTSquared, a user of the popular internet message board Reddit, explains, Spidey’s alter ego works as a photographer at newspaper The Daily Bugle, and when Dufresne is ready to spill the beans on the corrupt warden of Shawshank Prison, he sends his evidence to a newspaper called The Daily Bugle. We’ll allow him to explain in his own words:
MrTSquared ends his post by admitting that it’s kind of dumb and doesn’t make sense, as Spidey’s Daily Bugle was based out of New York City, and Shawshank’s Daily Bugle was based out of Portland, Maine. However, a fellow Redditor had a hand-wave explanation:
So, the newspapers themselves are related. Other redditors didn’t really care about the logic, they just wanted to imagine what a Marvel Cinematic Universe that contained Stephen King’s entire fictional universe — where all of his characters and stories are interconnected and reappear over and over in various books and stories — would look like:
While another Redditor found a way that the stories could overlap more directly:
Whatever the case, the important thing to remember is that Spider-Man is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.