Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026, Dir. Destin Daniel Cretton):
Hi, my name is Peter Parker. You won’t remember me but I have something to tell you that’s gonna sound crazy. But it’s the truth. And I know you’re gonna believe me, because you’re very good at telling when I’m lying. We knew each other. We were together. But something bad was going to happen. The only way to stop it was to make everyone forget me. Because I’m not just Peter Parker. I’m Spider-Man. And sometimes Spider-Man has to make tough choices, even if it breaks Peter Parker’s heart.
Peter Parker, Spider-Man: Brand New Day
It’s ironic but somehow fitting that as the fortunes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have waxed and waned, the one undeniable constant, the one hero called upon to shore things up whenever the overall enterprise threatens to jump the rails, has been Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man), who kicked off the modern superhero movie boom in 2002 with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. It’s doubly ironic given the wall-crawler’s relatively modest stature as a street-level superhero. Spidey’s appeal is rooted in the push-pull between his free-spirited, high-flying antics and his very grounded milieu, as he deals with the same crap the rest of us deal with: relationship issues, dead-end jobs, the difficulty of just getting through the day. The better Spider-Man movies (Raimi’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, the more recent Spider-Man: Homecoming) acknowledge this tension, giving our hero and his hood recognizable human dimensions even as he battles with goblins and octopus-men.
All of that started to fade with Spider-Man: Far from Home; instead of being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, our favorite web-slinger (Tom Holland) found himself fending off drones and CGI-enhanced perils in Venice and London (no disrespect to those fine cities, but they ain’t Queens) while struggling to find his place in a post-Avengers world. To be fair, that was the point: in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man was now a linchpin, the added responsibility threatening to remove him from his proper context, a prospect Spidey himself found none too appealing. Spider-Man: No Way Home took things one step further, inflating the stakes to multiverse-shaking proportions even as it indulged in unmatched fan service, bringing back former Spider-Men (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) and Spider-adversaries. But with all the clatter, the efforts to connect with other Marvel properties, and the callbacks to previous franchises, Holland’s Spider-Man, agreeable as he was, was getting lost in the sauce. The answer? A clean slate, as No Way Home concluded with all of Peter’s friends, family and foes getting his existence wiped from their memories. It was as if the filmmakers were saying: Yeah, this got a little out of hand, just give us a mulligan.
For the most part, Spider-Man: Brand New Day makes good on the promise of its title, recalibrating the Spider-Man brand as a more down-to-earth proposition, liberated from MCU machinery (at least for now). Taking its cue from Spider-Man 2, the story is more concerned with how gosh-darned hard it is to be both Peter Parker and Spider-Man. It’s been four years since No Way Home, and current-day Peter is content to devote all his energies to being the best crimefighter he can be (for once, the story doesn’t venture outside the five boroughs) while compartmentalizing his regrets about the friends he’s lost, including nerdy Ned (Jacob Batalon) and the love of his life MJ (Zendaya). Still, there are perks to his new lifestyle: Spidey is now a beloved cult hero and the police, represented by Detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), are more than happy to accept his help. But even DeWolff has concerns about Peter’s all-work-no-play approach: “Being married to the job isn’t going to get you anywhere,” she warns him. “What you need is some real human contact.”
The bulk of Brand New Day tracks Peter’s progress back to human connection, with action-packed detours en route. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-chi) lacks Raimi’s visual verve, but he knows how to keep the pace brisk and the mood ingratiating. We’ve reached the point where it’s difficult to differentiate computer-generated mayhem from practical effects (and stunt performers), but rather than fussing over photo-realism, Brand New Day opts for a casual, rubbery feel in its action beats, as Spider-Man and his adversaries flip, bounce and crash with abandon. But even at its lightest, the movie has a welcome touch of gravity to it, best embodied in Holland’s performance. When called upon to brood (e.g., The Odyssey) he’s out of his element, but he’s well-suited for a character like Peter, who rides the line between giddiness and doubt from scene to scene, and he’s grown with the role. As the pressures of being Spider-Man play havoc with his body chemistry, resulting in unwelcome changes such as growing organic web shooters in his wrists, Holland plays up the humor in his plight for all it’s worth, especially in the icky-funny scene in which Spidey jizzes web fluid all over himself, with all the control of a freshly pubescent teen.
Brand New Day doesn’t avoid references to Marvel lore and characters, but in keeping with the movie’s more measured approach, it doesn’t bog itself down with them. Cameos are kept short and sweet, whether it’s a confab with the new Black Widow (a sly Florence Pugh) in a Turkish bath or a face-off with The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). The film is even sly enough to turn the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) into comic relief. In the Punisher TV show, a little of Bernthal goes a long way, but as Spider-Man’s de-facto sidekick, he mixes in rare notes of self-deprecation and pathos along with the usual growly menace.
Aligning with the movie’s more modest trappings, the stakes are less than gargantuan (“Small stuff,” as Black Widow puts it dismissively). An unseen antagonist is taking control of others’ minds in an attempt to infiltrate the Department of Damage Control, a SHIELD-like repository of superhero gadgets and powers. “You can look at threats and only see the danger, or you can see opportunities,” says Metzger (Tramell Tillman), Damage Control’s head honcho. “Our mission is to turn destructive energy into something useful.” Sounds benign enough, if you can get past the fact that the department isn’t above apprehending, incarcerating and experimenting on meta-humans. (Don’t look too deeply into the film’s morals though: Damage Control might resemble a paramilitary force like ICE, but we’re meant not to think too hard about Peter’s use of surveillance cams all over the city to spy on and ID people.) The assailant turns out to be one very pissed-off teen (Sadie Sink, importing her doomy vibe from Stranger Things) who’s looking for her sister, and her existential crisis—super-powered, cut off from friends and family—mirrors Spidey’s. It all builds to a city-threatening climax (but only a one-kilometer-radius of city—like Black Widow said, this is “small stuff”) that’s less important than Holland and Sink finding a way to overcome their mutual solitude.
While this more personal angle is a welcome shift, Brand New Day isn’t as emotionally coherent as Spider-Man 2 (still the best Spidey live-action film). The movie sets up an intriguing quandary—is Holland’s Spidey ready to ditch his Peter Pan persona and grow up a little?-–but doesn’t invest in it fully, apart from some imagined pep talks with the late Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and a final catharsis that’s basically lifted straight from last year’s Thunderbolts. Zendaya gets a nicely barbed moment when her mind is taken over by Sink and she taunts Holland (a little nastiness suits her); otherwise she’s reduced to being reactive in her interactions with her former love while he falls all over himself trying to apologize to her. For all the focus on Peter learning that he needs other people, regular humans like Zendaya and Batalon get short shrift.
Brand New Day concludes with a simple message: we all need each other. Not the most earth-shaking sentiment, but in these contentious times, it’s a perfectly fine button on a perfectly fine comic-book movie. If Brand New Day is not as fine-tuned as it could have been, it nevertheless indicates a viable path forward for the Spider-Man franchise, with a better balance between emotional beats and vertiginous action set-pieces. Given the film’s mammoth box office take so far, maybe Marvel will learn that not every movie it produces needs to lean on lore and multiverses and fan service. Then again, Peter has always been his own thing, and maybe it’s for the best that he’s at his best in his own borough. Sometimes a friendly neighborhood superhero and a warm and fuzzy message is enough. ■
