Marvel's Spider-Man came about after Sony Interactive Entertainment's Connie Booth visited Insomniac Games and suggested a game based on a Marvel property. Insomniac had only made original games until then, and the project became its first licensed property in its 22-year history. Marvel chose not to base the game on an existing film or comic story, letting the studio pick a character and write something new. The team chose Spider-Man because they related to Peter Parker, an everyday person with problems. Writers made the game as much Peter's story as Spider-Man's, skipped retelling the origin, and built the plot around a relationship with Otto Octavius. The game was announced at E3 in 2016 and finished in 2018 after about four years of development.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.