Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

Rated PG-13 for some scary stuff.  I thought that this movie was going to go full Man-Spider and make the film terrifying.  Even if you use "The Other" storyline as a foundation, it still doesn't make the film as disturbing as that.  Really, I could have brought my five and eight-year-olds, but that's really kind of pushing it.  There is the regular amount of superhero violence.  A lot of the film is about mental health, which can get a little heavy.  The Punisher swears a lot, even if it is a comfort with the s-word.  Still, it feels darker than it is.

DIRECTOR:  Destin Daniel Cretton

I got to see one of the biggest movies on opening weekend!  That's a nice little treat.  I'd also like to say that I got to see this with my older two kids in 3D!  About a decade ago, I was the biggest advocate for 3D films.  In fact, I probably spent way more money than I had to trying to get 3D tickets for movies that, frankly, didn't need to be in 3D.  But my son and I agree.  The perfect film for 3D might be Spider-Man: Brand New Day.  Here's the deal.  Spider-Man swings through buildings in all of his movies.  And I can't attest that this is true or false because I haven't seen the 2D print of this film, but I feel like Cretton made this movie with a sense of agorophobia.  (Okay, I was shooting for "fear of heights", but I don't have good internet and I can't look up the term I'm really looking for.) 

I'm not going to say anything too controversial in saying that Tom Holland is an incredible Spider-Man.  (Maybe a spectacular Spider-Man?)   But I'm going to rile some feathers in saying that Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies are all exactly what they need to be.  Even Spider-Man: Far From Home?  I'm going to say especially Far From Home.  I love these movies.  Now, I know that this is the first movie from Tom Holland's serise of Spider-Man movies directed by Destin Daniel Cretton.  It's a new trilogy and I was wondering if the same wonder was going to be caught in this new series of movies.  Somehow, Brand New Day feels like a new trilogy with a new tone while still capturing a lot of the magic that the previous movies really touched on.

If the "Home" movies were about a young Peter Parker embracing the fact that he's a rookie on the grand scheme of things (despite the fact that he's been to space and fought Thanos), this is the first movie that talks about the world weary Spider-Man.  I'm a guy who owns every Amazing Spider-Man comic book.  I've read a lot of books with this guy.  I have to think that this choice is a conscious decision to mirror the comics.  Peter has never had it easy.  The "Home" movies acknowledged that it's hard to be a young Spider-Man.  But there was always kind of a lightness to those early Stan Lee / Steve Ditko movies.  Sure, Peter cried a lot.  Sure, he screwed up his life a lot.  But he was also still a kid who had a roof over his head.  But a lot of Spider-Man's career has been about the isolation that comes with being a superhero.

I like that Marvel is actively addressing mental health crises.  I wonder if it was just kismet that Florence Pugh's Black Widow was the surprise cameo (sorry for spoiling that, but it really doesn't change the movie).  The Thunderbolts movie was all about the problem with trying to survive in the world on your own when community is so important to thriving in the world today.  With the way that things were left at the end of No Way Home, we were kind of promised the culmination of three movies of promise: that we'd have a street level, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.  But the thing about that street level Spider-Man is that he's alone in the world.  If things didn't work out in high school, things really weren't going to go well when Peter was an adult.  The safety net was gone and Peter has to kind of figure out what adulthood really looks like.  Yes, Dr. Strange's spell to make everyone forget Peter Parker is a nice fantasy convention to get people there, but it doesn't change the fact that Peter Parker deals with what a lot of adults deal with: friendships disappear.

Part of me doesn't want to understand why Peter is so self-sacrificing.  A lot of me thinks it's unnecessary.  After all, MJ and Ned were great in his life.  While Spider-Man is thriving as an institution to the city (something that we also saw in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3), Peter's life is falling apart more than normal.  He's physically in pain due to the fact that his mental health is being ignored.  (Remember, mental health care is also health care!) But I also somehow believe it in this story.  Maybe I'm lying to myself because I want the movie to work.  But I also genuinely believe that Peter thinks that he's doing the right thing for Peter and Ned.  After all, watching the two of them thriving without Peter injecting their lives with chaos has to be pretty painful.  Sure, MJ looks sad all the time.  But if you made a checklist of all the wins that she has in her column, I get the need to see yourself as a burden on someone else.

But I want to get back to street level Spider-Man!  As much as I love the "Home" trilogy, both Far From Home and No Way Home have a scale to them that never really felt like Spider-Man was someone who handled the small, important problems. You know, the problems that Black Widow refers to as "small potatos."  And I have to give Cretton so many props.  I don't know how he injected so much into this movie and still made it feel really intimate.  There are a thousand plots in this movie.  There are so many references.  There are emotional turns and shifts.  Yet, the whole movie feels cohesive.  I think that has to come with the character of Spider-Man himself.

One of the things that makes Peter Parker such a loser while Spider-Man is such a hero is the idea that he has too much on his plate.  Maybe that's the movie's thesis statement.  The opening of the film shows Spider-Man absolutely crushing it.  He takes on (a live action!) Tombstone, Scorpion, Boomerang, the Hand, and that guy who is like the Juggernaut --but isn't.  Jean DeWolff (two The Bear alumni in one movie!) is both proud of Spider-Man and concerned for the young man underneath it all.  There's something earnestly toxic about DeWolff as a character.  She's constantly saying that Spider-Man needs to take a break, yet will still send him out for these death-defying missions that seem suicidal, regardless of how you look at it.  But all that stuff is saying that while Peter may be handling the small potatoes, there are so many small potatoes that it is overwhelming.  Yeah, Jean Grey (oh, sorry about that spoiler too) freezes a kilometer of New York City.   But the reason that she explodes like that is pretty small.  It's a girl looking for her sister.  Yes, it seems like a huge deal because young Jean Grey's powers simply involves body swapping.  But that story is far more chaotic because Peter is worried about a change and the fact that he's dealing with headaches and he's losing his sense of self.

I want to talk about Jean Grey for a second.  I love that this is how we're being introduced to X-Men characters.  I noticed that Brian Michael Bendis got a thank you in the credits because I think a lot of this movie owes a debt to Bendis's run on both Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men.  Yeah, I know that the comics has Peter and Kitty Pryde as a romantic pairing, but I see a lot of that dynamic happening with Jean Grey.  It's really weird because we don't often see Jean Grey at this point in her development.  Jean always kind of started at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.  Seeing what it is like to be an Omega level mutant before she knows how to do any of that stuff brings up interesting questions about morality.

See, I was bothered with one shot in particular.  There are moments where Jean does some morally dubious things.  The whole hunt for MJ is pretty gross.  But I want to talk about the fact that Jean let a construction worker get hit by a car. However, her frustration kind of makes sense given the fact that her life is miserable.  Marvel's been pretty good about making their antagonists sympathetic.  In fact, Brand New Day does it so well that Jean isn't even a bad guy by the end of the movie.  She's going to be a hero, right?  (I hear that she might be in Avengers: Doomsday.)   But for all of the other X-Men films telling us that it is hard to be a mutant, Brand New Day actually made it very real and very grounded.

Golly, there are a ton of beats in this movie.  I cannot reiterate enough how many disperate storylines there are in this movie.  I was worried about how Jon Berenthal's Punisher would work with this Spidey.  I'm really back and forth on the Punisher.  He's a character that I wish would die with time because he's so problematic.   Also, while I love Jon Berenthal's performances and take on the Punisher, I don't love what the One Shot One Last Kill said about what the Punisher should be.  But I do like the fact that there are certain people that should be in each other's orbits.  Two of those characters should be Spider-Man and the Punisher.  I don't like how friendly these two got, especially by the end of the movie.  Peter is glossing over how violent Frank Castle gets, but I do like that they have a relationship.  

I don't even have anything to say about the Hulk, despite the fact that he was magnificent in this movie.  Sure, I think Spider-Man should absolutely be dead based on some of those hits, especially if a bullet can rip into him that hard.  I also kind of want Peter to go back to webshooters.  Still, I dug that the Hulk scene played as well as it did, especially involving Punisher's limited involvement.

Hey, before I close up, I want to talk about something that absolutely doesn't matter.  My stupid headcanon is that MJ remembers Pete.  There's a bit of debate online about who remembers what.  Let's go from firmest belief to least firm belief.  I absolutely believe that Hulk remembers Pete, but that's because I'm slightly cheating.  Beneath that, I believe that Ned remembers Pete, simply because of the delivery that Jacob Batalon gives.  But finally, if the first two are true, I believe that MJ remembers Pete, but understands that there's too much chaos to simply go back to the way things were.  She's also probably reeling with a lot in that moment.  Also, the assumption that she can just meet Pete where he is is completely unfair.  Just thoughts.  

Anyway, maybe its some recency bias, but this might be my favorite Spider-Man, at least from the Holland trilogy.