Years ago I first learned about the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Now as I learn about networks I realize that Kevin Bacon does not have six degrees but instead he has a reachability of 6. This led me to wonder about other networks the actors of different film would create especially when limited to a single franchise. With the recent release of Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, I figured that the three recent iterations of Spider-Man would create an interesting network as it would have multiple distinct clusters while also having significant connectedness.

Materials/Method

For this project the primary piece of software used was Gephi which was used to create the network. As for the data it was manually collected from the actors page related to each of the eight different movies on IMDB and placed in a spreadsheet. From there I used R and the code given to us by our professor to transform the spreadsheet into an edge table so that Gephi could use it.

With the data now in Gephi I started out by trying different layouts before settling on Force Layout 2 as it gave the best spread and created clear clusters for each iteration of Spider-Man and for each movie. From here I ran the modularity function to cluster the different the three iterations into their own class. I then created a fourth class for those who were in all three iterations. Next I rotated the network to make it better fit in landscape mode and have a flat bottom before finally labeling key aspects of the network.

Results

There were two main takeaways that surprised me. First was that the diameter of this network is 3 because I thought Stan Lee would be connected to everyone except those exclusively in Spider-Man: No Way Home but I forgot that Lee died in 2018 and was thus unable to appear in Spider-Man: Far From Home as well. This lead to there being a reachability of 3 between those exclusively in Spider-Man: Far From Home and The Amazing Spider-Man. The second detail that surprised me was the existence of an uncredited actress named Marmee Regine Cosico, that was in one movie for each of the three Spider-Man iterations and thus making her the only other actor besides Stan Lee to do so.

Overall the network has density of 0.158 and an average weighted degree of 172. This degree is significantly higher than the average number of actors per film of 148 which shows how many actors preformed alongside each other in multiple films.

Reflection for the Future

If I were to do a project like this again I would probably take it up a notch and do the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to see just how that network works out. Something else that could lead to interesting results is to redo this project excluding extras and uncredited actors as this would only include the main actors of each film resulting in less crossover. Doing this method would also clear up the largest difficulty that I had when doing this project which was “how do I classify those that were in two different iterations of Spider-Man” as the main contributors to this problem were the uncredited actors.