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# Spider-Man: Brand New Day
- URL: https://www.afterimages.film/spider-man-brand-new-day/
- Published: 2026-08-21T03:54:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T20:31:36.000Z
- Description: A mostly triumphant reminder that these movies used to be a lot of fun.
- Author: Dennis Ramirez
- Tags: First Time Watch, #rating-7, In Theaters, 2026, Score: 7

### Going In

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had steadily diminishing returns since *Avengers: Endgame*. I've been doing a passive rewatch of the Phase 4 films in the background while working lately, and you could plot my engagement as a downward-sloping line graph, with maybe one or two spikes, based on how often I'd stop working to watch a scene.

One of those spikes was *Spider-Man: No Way Home*. The Tom Holland Spidey movies are my favorite of all the iterations, and as much as *No Way Home* exists as a fan-service exercise, I think it still managed to extract genuine emotional stakes.

With that in mind, I was originally planning to wait until this hit streaming, but the positive reception among critics and friends triggered an itch and a hope that maybe the MCU might finally have some juice in it again, so I went in with pretty mixed expectations.

### Review

After the events of *No Way Home*, a spell was cast so that no one in the world remembers who Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is, and this has given him the freedom to fully dive into his life as Spider-Man. The problem is this also means the two most important people in his life, his now ex-best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and his now ex-girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), have also forgotten who he is. His desire to protect them outweighs his yearning to reconnect, so while this setup leads to a fun opening montage of Spidey facing off against one-off villains from his comics' rogues gallery, it's contrasted with him mournfully watching their lives progress without him via social media stories.

The best thing about the preceding trilogy is the relationship and chemistry between these three characters, so upending that dynamic is a strong choice that sets up some real character drama. In classic Spidey fashion, it completely sucks to be Spider-Man. Aside from the spell, he's also carrying the grief of losing his beloved Aunt May, which, combined with the loss of his friends, has driven him to lose himself in his Spider-Man identity at the expense of his Peter Parker one. 

This demands a more mature performance from Tom Holland, who gets to flex a bit here, finally able to carry a movie on his own without Tony Stark to prop him up. His performance and the movie are strongest when it focuses on Peter, MJ, and Ned as events conspire to bring them together, despite Peter's best efforts to stay away. 

This is kicked into overdrive by the arrival of a villain who can mentally hop from person to person through a kind of telepathic possession, and Peter's emotional turmoil soon manifests physically as his body and powers begin to change (out with the web-shooters, in with the organic webs). This leads him to team up with The Punisher (John Bernthal), the epitome of neglecting your personal life for your work life, and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who knows a thing or two about how a body transforms under emotional stress. While this leans toward the MCU's fan-service nature, they also serve a story function as walking signposts of where Peter's life could lead if he can't get himself together.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned villain (whose name I'll omit because of spoilers) who brings them all together is the movie's main problem. This new character, played by Sadie Sink, ultimately serves to set up future movies, which is par for the course for the MCU, but her true identity is so important to the franchise that the movie stops being about Spidey and becomes her origin story for about 20 minutes, setting up a whole scope for the MCU that I felt was completely out of step with the true heart of the movie: Peter's broken relationship with his friends and whether he can move on or not. 

All that said, I still had a really fun time with this. The action and web-swinging are the best of all these movies, and Daniel Destin Cretton gets so much out of stunt coordinator Peng Zhang's choreography. The marriage of Spider-Man's unique powers with martial-arts-style choreography seems like such a no-brainer; I can't believe it hasn't been done before. The inclusion of The Hand, a secret ninja society borrowed from the Netflix MCU series, serves little to the actual story, but serves up plenty of truly dynamic and breathtaking action when pitted against Spider-Man, using his powers and agility in creative and inventive ways against foes who can move through the air as lithely and quickly as he can.

I was also genuinely moved by a few scenes, particularly one between Peter and MJ reckoning with the effects of the spell, and the resolution of Sadie Sink's character arc, particularly as it shows how, despite everything, Peter's strongest superpower is his ability to bring out the best in everyone around him, no matter how damaged they are.

In the end, I left the theater with the same excitement I used to get from the Infinity Saga era movies. I was beaming, and dare I say, excited to see what might happen next for Peter Parker. 

### The Afterimage

*All the things that stick with me after the credits roll*

I know the nature of the MCU, being comics-as-movies, means none of these movies will ever stand on their own. In all fairness, that's what made me love these movies in the first place: seeing whether episodic storytelling would work in a film medium. And yes, getting a chance to see all the stories I loved reading as a kid played out competently on the big screen and taken fairly seriously. For as much as it was made up along the way, the Infinity Saga at least felt like there was a point to this experiment, that the fan-service, character reveals, and shared universe were all in concert, promising a plan and payoff that would justify any missteps along the way, which I believe they achieved with *Avengers: Endgame*.

All of those storytelling choices have been leveled as criticisms against the MCU since its inception, and I didn't really understand that POV until the current Multiverse Saga. The pandemic definitely derailed things for the industry as a whole, much less the MCU, and they were also beset by things out of their control, like the untimely passing of Chadwick Boseman and the allegations against Jonathan Majors. 

These pivots and the increasingly poor reception to the movies have made the intended march to what is now *Avengers: Doomsday* (previously *Avengers: The Kang Dynasty* until the aforementioned controversy with Jonathan Majors) seem, at best, thin, if not completely without direction or a sense of inevitability. Characters and events have been introduced as important for the future, only to never be referenced again, and the fan service now feels like desperation to keep interest in a wilting behemoth that was once king of the mountain.

##### Spoiler Warning

With all this in mind, the introduction of Sadie Sink's Jean Grey into the MCU in *Brand New Day* kinda threw me for a loop, and is what has stuck with me most since watching the movie. 

As much as I liked that Jean's story arc is an interesting parallel to Peter's story, in regards to coming to terms with new powers and being unable/unwilling to deal with one's grief, introducing the concept of mutants to the MCU and the attached cultural baggage of what they represent undercuts an otherwise very personal story. At one point, Peter creates a power inhibitor to suppress his new powers that is eventually used on Jean Grey. Mutants in Marvel Comics are people born with their powers, born different with all the cultural baggage that entails, and the use of devices to suppress/cure mutants of their powers, usually by force, is a huge idea that I feel deserves its own movie to truly explore.

I fully accept this is a me problem, because I'm a fan of the X-Men and Marvel lore in general, and casual viewers probably won't care. But I still feel it could be frustrating for any viewer, as the movie shifts into a completely different gear to give Jean an origin story, like I flipped the channel. There was promise in the previously mentioned parallels between Jean's story and Peter's, but it felt redundant next to the inclusion of the Punisher and the Hulk, both already very on-the-nose "this could be you if you're not careful" warnings for Peter. 

Ultimately, I know it's not actually a big deal. This is just me doing some nerd complaining about the thing I used to love, and it probably won't matter anyway after *Avengers: Doomsday* and *Avengers: Secret Wars* are likely to reboot the whole thing. I did have a lot of fun with the movie, but this has been a little splinter in my mind ever since, and I just had to get it all out and try to make sense of it.

- Peter Parker  
  - Just because we've lost someone, it doesn't mean we have to do this alone. I mean we can't. Trust me, I've been trying. It doesn't work.
- May Parker  
  - You're beautiful, and the people who love you, they love you not because you're special, we love you because you're you. Remember that even when it feels like you're totally alone. That's your deepest responsibility. Never forget that, no matter how powerful you become.

### Line Readings

Writers

Andrzej Żuławski, Frederic Tuten

![Spider-Man: Brand New Day](https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/iPOn6DinuVyLY17YM9mKuPofV08.jpg) 

Director

#### Destin Daniel Cretton

Budget

##### $225M

Release Date

Released

##### Jul 29, 2026

Runtime

##### 2h 25m

[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3uI5sLosKU&ref=afterimages.film) [ ](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22084616/?ref=afterimages.film) [ ](https://letterboxd.com/film/spider-man-brand-new-day/?ref=afterimages.film) 

Data provided by TMDB

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