I couldn’t be more out on the MCU right now. At this point, I genuinely think the whole thing might be cooked. I’ve been watching Spider-Man movies in theaters for more than 20 years, and I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day in the same theater where I saw the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man. Spider-Man himself, meanwhile, remains completely undefeated. The character is still an absolute monster at the box office, and Brand New Day is looking like it could have one of the biggest openings in movie history. That doesn’t automatically make a Spider-Man movie good, but I went into this one with basically no hype. The trailers weren’t doing much for me, and I think some of that was my general exhaustion with the MCU bleeding into my excitement for another Spider-Man movie. So I decided to just forget about the MCU for a couple of hours and judge this as a Spider-Man movie. And holy shit, this movie is really, really good.
I think Brand New Day is easily the best Tom Holland Spider-Man movie, and the biggest reason is Holland himself. I genuinely think making The Odyssey leveled him up as an actor. Whatever he learned from that experience, you can feel it here. He feels more confident and more mature, both as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, and I honestly think this might be the best performance I’ve ever seen from him in the role. That’s saying something considering how perfect I think Tobey Maguire was in Spider-Man 2, but Holland has finally reached a point where he completely owns the character. He’s older, he’s living on his own, he’s grinding it out, and he’s not being treated like a kid anymore. That’s the Spider-Man I want to watch.
That maturity also makes this feel like the most genuinely Peter Parker-focused movie of Holland’s run. Zendaya continues to get better, Jacob Batalon is great as Ned but is used more sparingly, and I actually think the movie benefits from giving Peter more room to breathe on his own. The opening stretch might be my favorite part because it feels like a comic book ripped to life, almost like you’re flipping through issues and getting these quick little snapshots of Peter’s life as he takes on guys like Tombstone and Scorpion. The suit looks incredible, the web-slinging looks better than it ever has with Holland, and there’s just a confidence to the way this Spider-Man moves that I loved.
The action is probably the one area where I wasn’t completely sold. It’s good, and there are some really fun sequences, but everything feels a little too rushed and brief. When you compare it to something like the train sequence in Spider-Man 2, where the fight with Doc Ock goes on long enough that you genuinely feel the weight of every punch and every impact, Brand New Day doesn’t quite reach that level. The same goes for the best fights with Tobey’s Green Goblin. Those sequences have a physical heaviness to them that superhero movies rarely capture anymore. But even if the action doesn’t quite reach that level, the movie has something I think is just as important: it feels like everyone involved genuinely wanted to make a great Spider-Man movie.
Destin Daniel Cretton brings a different flavor after Jon Watts, and I think that change was important. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is another highlight. His chemistry with Holland is fantastic, and their banter is genuinely funny. The movie softens the Punisher a little bit because, obviously, this is still a Spider-Man movie, but Bernthal and Holland have some great scenes together, and I really liked the way their characters humanize one another. Getting the Hulk back was also a blast, and the sequence with Hulk, Spider-Man and Punisher is exactly the kind of comic-book insanity that works when the characters are actually fun together.
My one lingering frustration is that Peter still doesn’t really get a villain who feels personally connected to his life. This is probably the most Spider-Man-centric movie Holland has made, but it’s still part of a much larger MCU machine, and I would love to see this version of Peter eventually get a truly personal villain to deal with. That’s something the Holland movies have been missing.
Then there’s Sadie Sink. I thought she was good in the movie, and obviously her character represents something much bigger for the MCU because, yeah, the X-Men are coming. I’m genuinely curious about where they go with that. My one issue with Sink is that she has started to feel like she has one very specific mode: moody teenager. She did it in The Whale, she did it in Stranger Things, and she does it here. At some point you start wondering how many times you’re going to see essentially the same performance. Still, I liked her here, and I’m very interested in seeing where Marvel takes the X-Men from this point forward. Personally, I’d love to see them go young and make them a group of moody teenagers who have no idea what they’re doing yet, with Charles Xavier slowly helping mold them into a team. That could be a really cool direction.
The funny thing is that, despite loving this movie, Brand New Day did not get me back on the MCU train. I still think Avengers: Doomsday could be cooked. And I genuinely don’t understand why Spider-Man isn’t being positioned more prominently in the next Avengers movie. If this movie is about to make more money in one weekend than most comic-book movies have made across their entire theatrical runs in the post-Endgame era, how are you not putting Spider-Man front and center? Maybe Holland’s schedule with The Odyssey made that impossible. Maybe there’s some bigger plan we don’t know about. But from the outside, it feels like an enormous missed opportunity. The post-credit scene obviously seems to tease Peter’s eventual involvement in Secret Wars and Battleworld, and if Marvel isn’t planning on making him a huge part of that movie, they’re absolutely out of their minds.
Because Spider-Man is just his own beast. Brand New Day reminded me of that. I walked into this movie completely checked out on the MCU, and I walked out thinking this was everything I want from a Spider-Man movie: comic-book panels brought to life, a more mature Peter Parker, great villains, a fantastic performance from Tom Holland, and a sense that the people making it actually cared about getting Spider-Man right. I genuinely think Holland may have finally cemented himself as my favorite Peter Parker and Spider-Man. I walked out thinking, yeah, this guy fucking gets it.
So no, Brand New Day didn’t get me back into the MCU.
It just reminded me why I’ll always show up for Spider-Man.
Spiderman Brand New Day = 92/100
