Another thing, and I hesitate to opine on this because I don’t really know, but I get the impression that the arcs of Spiderman’s swings in both comics and movies don’t always make perfect geometric or physics sense.
It’s true. I once played a Spider-Man video game and once Peter got to Queens it became jumping from rooftop to rooftop time.
Oh, I really do think this Aunt (Marissa To-)May is a variant 
Also, in the current films his classmates are so far afield from their comic book counterparts as to be completely different characters that only share a name (MJ, Ned Leeds, Betty Brant). Flash Thompson is a wee bit closer in that he’s still a Spider-man obsessed bully to Parker, but he’s not a hugely popular BMOC-type alpha male jock with pretty girls dripping off of him that regularly scores victories over Peter.
The endless re-tellings of the origin stories are of course technically all variants in and of themselves, but they all at least seem to be making the attempt of taking PP from the page as near as can be and putting him up on the screen. It all comes down to “How different is *too *different?” I don’t know if I’m being weirdly atypical, but I think race, gender, sexual orientation are all kind of major building blocks of our essential selves and swapping any of those out with something else is a major change. Again, there are a lot of other things they could do that would be nearly or just as jarring as changing his race would be. If they made him way tall, sort, or muscle-bound, or gave him long and shaggy hair, I’d still internally feel like it was just weirdly wrong and a different Peter Parker even if nothing else changed.
I’m going to leave this discussion be at this point except for this little quibble. We are not comic book characters. If we start invoking what is an essential part of us as individual, then changing the year of birth is right out, even if other parts of us might be more malleable than we’d like to think: Are you really the real you? (Article in the Guardian.)
And maybe that’s the crux of it right there. There’s a small handful of characters that I’ve become so invested in that I want them to be treated as though they are real people.
That was an interesting article by the way. I’ve never heard of that show before, but it sounds fascinating.
One could argue that, because our birthdates don’t change, real people go through more changes to “our essential selves” than comic book characters do. I’m certainly not the same person that I was 30 years ago, but Clark Kent mostly is the same person he was 30 years ago.
Hell, I’m not sure I’m the same person I was before I started this thread. Which makes me wonder about my own personal investment in characters.