'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' Does Whatever a Fourth Film Can

Five years is a long time to wait. For Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and for Marvel Studios’ ever-captive audience, that’s how much time has passed since the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the multiversal event that briefly brought Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s iterations of the friendly neighborhood web-slinger into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and audiences worldwide back to the theaters after the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting nearly $2 billion at the box office.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

In that film’s climax, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange wiped the entire world’s memory of the fact that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. It was a clean start for the character whose stand-alone MCU films felt more burdened by their interconnectedness with the franchise around them than they felt liberated by it. Starting with a seemingly clean slate, why is Spider-Man: Brand New Day more overstuffed than ever?

In Holland’s fourth solo outing, a mysterious new threat (Sadie Sink) emerges who puts MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) in danger as she hunts for a secret wrapped up with William Metzger (Tramell Tillman) and the Department of Damage Control. While trying to figure out who this threat is and what she means for his friends who don’t remember him and the world at large, Spidey’s arachnid DNA starts to spike, forcing him to seek help from New York locals like the gun-toting Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and the mostly mild-mannered professor Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 got flack for overcomplicating a knotty plot with excessive characters back in 2007 because it featured two-and-a-half villains. In 2026, with team-ups and in-world references built up within an 18-years-running interconnected universe, Raimi’s film seems quaint in comparison. The experiment of this universe once felt novel and genuinely impressive; 2012’s The Avengers was a watershed moment for Hollywood. It was an ambitious crossover blockbuster that had never been attempted before and it worked, defining the rest of the decade for better and mostly worse. 

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

In the years since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame – the culmination of what the studio calls The Infinity Saga – the wheels have been falling off. Brand New Day topples under the weight of its responsibility. A Spider-Man movie can’t just be a Spider-Man movie anymore. It must reckon with its shared universe and lay track for a dubious future. Destin Daniel Cretton, taking over directing duties from Jon Watts, had a lovely touch during his independent career with films like Short Term 12 (2013), but his previous MCU outing, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), fell flat like nearly every other Marvel project since Endgame.  

Read Hector's review of 'The Eternals' (2021)

With its hallmark waxy sheen, shoddy VFX and increasingly disjointed scripts, the mammoth franchise has become more and more second-rate over the years. What was once exciting about the shared universe of films now feels daunting. This is the MCU’s 38th cinematic entry, excluding the 13 live-action MCU shows on Disney Plus. The cute connect-the-dots, Easter egg-style storytelling that was gratifying for comic nerds (and invisible for laypeople) has become an overwhelming evidence board overflowing with red string. The list of prerequisites for entry has become CVS receipt-length, and they know it. There aren’t any other movies on the Marvel slate until 2028, with the hefty exceptions of two Avengers films that seem to be an attempt at smashing the big red reset button. This begs the question: Why even care?

For one, it’s Spider-Man. Beyond Batman and Superman, Spidey is probably the most iconic comic book character in the world. Holland’s interpretation has become particularly beloved over the ten years he’s been playing the character, and for good reason. Holland carries an innate goodness that goes beyond what Maguire and Garfield’s charms brought to the character. There’s a bone-deep sense of moral righteousness and dignity that Holland embodies as an actor, along with a comfort delivering the necessary quips and thwips. 

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures / Jay Maidment.

No Way Home’s ending was the most daring aspect of an otherwise abysmal film and the ways in which Brand New Day picks up that thread are where it sings. Peter’s yearning to reconnect with MJ and Ned is established over an impressively zippy and emotional opening montage that sees him isolating more and more to focus on fighting crime while he watches Instagram stories of his loved ones thriving at MIT without any memory of him. 

Cretton’s direction shines in the mostly visual and word-light sequence as he digs deep into Peter’s pain. Despite the made-for-streaming look of it all – expectedly disastrous like the bulwark of other studio films – it’s effectively emotional. Then the movie grinds into gear. 

Brand New Day’s basic premise is being hidden for odd reasons. Marvel and co. are not so successfully obscuring the identity of Sink’s character for little reason other than to generate false excitement, especially when there’s no real twist to reveal. Her identity is treated like an Earth-shattering secret while, in the film, it’s a mystery for no more than the first act, and its disclosure is not exactly a bombshell.

Without revealing the non-reveal, it’s safe to say that Sink, who continues to prove herself as the only real survivor of Stranger Things, will have a big part to play in the franchise’s future. But, that’s the problem. Her inclusion in this film makes little sense in the world of Spider-Man, which sounds ludicrous, and it is. Yet, emotionally, her introduction forces the film to revolve around it and all of its implications while throwing a monkey wrench into what the film really should be about: Peter and MJ.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures / Jay Maidment.

Holland and Zendaya’s off-screen romance surely adds to their on-screen frisson, but their scenes light up the screen in a way little else does amid weightless action sequences and expository plot mechanics. A boy yearning for a girl after their love was lost to greater consequence is so simple and the duo, under Cretton’s careful direction, plays it with poignance. Both actors have a solid grasp of these characters after living with them for so long, and their moments together, alongside those with the ever-charming Batalon, resemble the closest thing to a good movie that this franchise has offered in years. 

Unfortunately, they’re swimming in a morass of Marvelisms that get tossed up higher and higher until their tenderness is sidelined in favor of anonymous gaudy fights and obligatory franchise set-up. It’s the evergreen issue with this experiment: real character beats get undercut by quips or sideswiped by teasing the next entry.

Though Brand New Day doesn’t have much explicit future-teasing outside of Sink, it’s packed to the gills. Bernthal and Holland are wonderful together and their relationship of contrasts works in the movie because it feels organic. Their performances are a pitter-patter of endearingly exasperated collaboration whose joint moments render the nerdy rush of glee seeing comic panels brought to life. Otherwise, the Sink plot’s enlistment of the Hulk, saccharine flashbacks and the ninja group known as The Hand all play without a solid foundation to stand on. 

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures / Jay Maidment.

On top of all this, Peter’s loneliness-activated arachnid issues tiptoe slowly and surely into Saturday morning PSA territory. It’s easy to chalk most of this up to screenwriters Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, who penned the last two entries. Their mechanical mystery box approach to structure and didactic dialogue ended up kneecapping those films as it does this one. Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first entry in this new series, was co-written by them and, notably, Game Night (2018) scribes John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. It’s ironic to call that movie, which featured assists from Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, small-scale, but it seems that way now. Over three subsequent movies, despite frequent lip service to the contrary, Spider-Man is lost in the shuffle of the larger universe. 

These movies won’t ever stop. Just this past weekend, Ghost Rider and Black Panther 3 took center stage at San Diego Comic-Con and were bestowed with 2028 release dates, illuminating the ultimate catch-22 of these projects: they aren’t really films so much as they are products to be launched on time. Five years between entries isn’t normal, and this extended hiatus could've been a blessing to provide ample time to get this one right. Alas, Brand New Day is still a corporate project. Projected to open domestically around $250 million, it’s clear that people have missed Spidey and will always seek him out. As Marvel’s most iconic and hopeful character, he is their crown jewel. 

In Brand New Day, the sincere still falls victim to the corporate plan. To hold a referendum on blockbusters and superhero movies at large every time one of these comes out is silly, yet we’re forced to, because none of them has proven the ability to stand on its own. Even your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man must make way for the MCU’s next stage of box office conquest rather than focus on that friendly neighborhood. 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens in theaters everywhere July 31. 

-August