OVERVIEW
Four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which led Peter to ask Doctor Strange to wipe every memory of him, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has been working full-time as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, handling street crime and making the city the safest it has been in years. As anyone who has played countless hours of the Spider-Man PlayStation game knows, that routine grows tired fast, and Peter has been feeling increasingly alone and weary. He watches from the outside as his friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and his former girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) move on with their lives, until a threat emerges that may endanger them once again.
BACKGROUND
The title comes from the “One More Day” comic storyline, which saw Spider-Man trade his marriage for the life of Aunt May, causing the world to forget he was Spider-Man, as Joe Quesada, the editor at the time, believed that continuing Peter’s story with him married would reach a dead end. No Way Home left Peter in much the same place, and with that, Cretton had the blank slate to restart the Spider-Man journey, pitching a more grounded, “street-level” Spider-Man, shot on location in Glasgow.
The approach seems like a breath of fresh air amid growing superhero fatigue, with audiences increasingly tired of the Marvel spectacle, which led to their 2025 slate underperforming expectations. Despite a whopping reported $200 million budget, the idea of a not-city-level threat is always welcome. The director of the first three films, Jon Watts, does not return, stating he was “out of gas” after making No Way Home under COVID protocols, and director Destin Daniel Cretton steps into the director’s chair, having found critical acclaim for both Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the series Wonder Man.
THE REVIEW
No Way Home had its problems, but the coffee shop scene, where Peter decides against telling MJ who he is, was an extremely poignant moment, a close to that story that gave the studios permission to turn the page on the character. Despite the title and the insistence that this is a return to basics, the film finds itself stuck in the past. A long portion of the runtime goes to Peter coming to terms with the decision to let his friends go.
For every step in the right direction, there are a few backward steps that stop the film from moving forward. Peter has far fewer technological suits now, but he still spends hours behind computers like a junior Tony Stark. The street-level threats have better stunts and feel more organic than wrecking the whole city, but at the same time offer little menace. Classic comic villains like Scorpion (Michael Mando) are barely an inconvenience to the hero. The first hour can be summarized as the film spinning its wheels, with Peter watching his old friends from a distance and talking on the phone to his only remaining human connection, a police chief played by Liza Colón-Zayas, delightful and warm as always.
The strangest thing about the film is how it fails to make New York feel lived in. Sony sold this as the first MCU Spider-Man built entirely in a real city, and the New York that emerges is as small as the previous soundstage versions. Peter has a small apartment with neighbors, but it always feels artificial (as another character points out) and never once feels like a part of the surrounding city. It is quite common for something extraordinary to be happening in the street and bystanders going on with their lives. I know New York culture, but it ain’t that bad!
The film finally comes alive whenever Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle appears, by far the best supporting presence here, who has great banter with the hero and presents a darker version of what the spider could eventually become. Outside of him, cameos around him are fine and organically placed (one encounter in a banya is a highlight).
As for Peter, his arc grows tiresome and undoes much of what No Way Home settled in its final five minutes. Holland brings as much heart as possible, but his metamorphosis arc feels really stale, especially compared with how Raimi’s underrated Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 dealt with similar character progress. The antagonist can be spotted the second they show up on screen, which makes Peter’s trust in them hard to sit through. Despite the improved choreography and high-class visual effects, the action lacks suspense and still turns into visual noise. Adding to the underwhelming atmosphere, Giacchino’s score strips the characters of their heroism, and it is arguably his most anonymous work. Like the film, it is not bad, and it is hard to be excited about it either.
By the last act, the film mostly abandons its own identity and becomes another episode in the permanent franchise, setting up characters for the next adventure. This will keep happening until Marvel runs out of characters, and it is frustrating in a film that presents itself as a return to basics. The chapter it points to does sound intriguing, since the new character is the strongest element here and the source of the film’s most emotional moments (the flashback and the final revelation about what a word means are strong). But it is hard to be excited about it when we all know that when we finally get the film devoted to that character, it will probably be a preview of the one after it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is stuck between revisiting the past and setting up the future, losing the present in the process. What it offers on its own is a long and largely uninteresting study of what Peter’s decision in the last film cost him, with an unremarkable villain. Tom Holland still brings heart to the part, and his scenes with Bernthal produce the few strong character moments in the film. As with most of the MCU after Endgame, it promises that what comes next will be better than this, forgetting that this is the chapter people paid to see.