It’s going to be easy for people to cry recency bias the moment I say this, so let’s just get it said and take the hit: Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the greatest film we’ve ever gotten centered on this character. I have slept on that sentence for a full week before writing it here and putting it out there.
I previously thought that as more time goes on and I distance myself a little from the visceral high that I was left with when the end credits rolled, I would like the movie a little less, at the very least. But this is a film that is actually quite effective, the more you sit with it. I have spent many hours thinking about Peter Parker and this film since my first viewing, turning the film over in my hands like something I wasn’t quite ready to put down, and my love and appreciation for Brand New Day have only grown deeper since.
Audiences have watched multiple versions of Spidey swing across a screen since 2002, and I’ve enjoyed every single one of them (even The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which by no means is a great film, but does feature a fantastic Andrew Garfield performance). Add to that a childhood spent watching multiple cartoons about the character (TAS, Spectacular, and bits and pieces of Ultimate), not only have I grown up with this character, but his stories have practically been with me all my life.
The sheer awe you felt when you were a child watching Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man for the first time is almost inimitable. But, Spider-Man: Brand New Day somehow, for two and a half hours, made me feel like Spider-Man had come alive in front of my eyes; it felt most like Spider-Man out of all of his other live-action iterations, and Tom Holland felt like the titular character who had leaped fully off a comic book page. Watching this film, I felt a strong sense of compounding love for the character and an even deeper understanding of what he’s all about and what I see through him about my own life.
Brand New Day picks up in the wreckage of Doctor Strange’s spell, the one that made the entire world forget about the existence of Peter Parker (Tom Holland) at the end of No Way Home. In the last few years, Peter has built a new life with what’s left; he lives in a rundown attic apartment and uses a suit he stitched together himself. He’s alone. He’s grieving. And no amount of wisecracking under the mask changes that.
His Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) is dead. Ned (Jacob Batalon), his oldest friend, doesn’t know who he is anymore and has built a Spidey-Tracker app trying to find out, an act of devotion that reads as tragic as it does funny. MJ (Zendaya), the love of his life, looks straight through him.
This is about as far from the “Iron Man Junior” comparisons that trailed Holland’s earlier appearances as the character could possibly get. This guy was doxxed by a villain in front of the entire planet, and had to erase his own existence from everyone’s memory before he even had the chance to bury his aunt. At this point, the MCU Peter Parker has been put through more than any other cinematic iteration of this character has ever survived.
In the wake of all of that, his life now is very little about being Peter Parker and more about his single-minded devotion to saving a city that only knows him as Spider-Man. He has even suppressed his alter ego to the point where his whole body is mutating, and his senses and emotions have heightened an uncomfortable amount. Wait, is this Spider-Man story about work-life balance? Well, it kind of is. But mostly, at its core, Brand New Day is a story about grief and loneliness.
If you’ve ever lost someone or felt like there was genuinely no one you could call, if the future you once thought you were going to have no longer exists, and the people you wanted to be in it are no longer in your life, Holland’s performance here is going to strike a chord with you.
This is a sincere, solemn film, set inside an MCU that finally feels lived-in again rather than merely furnished. Every character, however brief their screen time, exists in service of Spider-Man the way a strong comic run would build them.
Many had been thinking or wanting Brand New Day to be a soft-reset moment to finally introduce Harry, Gwen, or whichever legacy name that gets floated around by the comicbook faithful ever so often. I’d rather have exactly what we got: a film actually interested in what it costs Peter to keep the truth from the two people he has left, and what that silence does to all three of them, rather than using No Way Home’s ending as an excuse to shuffle in a replacement supporting cast.
In a lot of ways, it plays as the emotional inversion of Spider-Man 2, and it works precisely because what the previous trilogy had actually done, across its full stretch, is something none of the other Spider-Man sagas managed. It showed us a Peter Parker well before the tragedies landed, the carefree, unburdened teenager surrounded by friends and an Aunt May who was this Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, which makes the isolation here land with real gravitas rather than arriving as default misery corn.
This Peter Parker is one of the best character builds the MCU has produced. The story dictates the film here, not the other way around. Brand New Day feels earned, which matters more than people give it credit for, because watching a character suffer purely as a starting condition makes you muted to it pretty quickly.
One of the major emotional cores of the film, alongside Peter and MJ, is Jean Grey, played by Sadie Sink, who is quite remarkable in a role I genuinely worried would crowd Peter out of his own movie; instead, writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers let her complement him.
The two of them mirror each other’s arcs in a way that feels genuinely earned rather than engineered.
I’m absolutely excited to see where her corner of the MCU goes from here, especially with the X-Men movie being helmed by the writing-directing duo behind Beef and Thunderbolts.
Meanwhile, Bernthal’s Punisher is another one of those delightful additions to the film, one I enjoyed more than I expected to. Turns out I really like seeing Punisher in projects like Born Again or Spider-Man, rather than in his own solo outing, which feels a bit like a reheated soufflé. Spider-Man really adds new life to this character, and the chemistry between these two very much reads as real because it sorta is; the two actors’ actual friendship is quite apparent in the product we got, made all the sweeter by the comics history these two characters already share.
Mark Ruffalo also turns up as Bruce Banner, and Florence Pugh as Yelena, and both are not only a joy to see on-screen again, but their parallels to Peter’s journey make their inclusions feel rather rewarding for long-term MCU fans.
Amidst responsibility and sacrifice, Spidey’s story has always been about a guy who has to embrace change, grief, and really explore and accept what it means to be different in life. It is the story of the human heart in conflict with itself, and the duo of Cretton as a director and Holland as the titular character understand that all too well. I’ve largely lost patience with mindless action and bloated CGI final acts as a viewing pleasure, so I was quite overjoyed that the action here is measured out in careful, perfect doses rather than dumped wall to wall. When the set pieces do arrive, they’re some of the best this character’s had on screen since Maguire’s era.
Tom Holland remains one of the great casting decisions in this entire genre, not simply because he embodies Peter physically and tonally, but because he clearly, genuinely gets it. We’re lucky to have him in the role, and his performance is my favorite part about this film.
There’s something specific about casting a 19-year-old in this part that pays off years later in a way nobody could have planned for: if you’re roughly his generation, you get to watch yourself age alongside him, film to film. Much like Peter, you’ve probably experienced your own little losses by now. Lost people, lost places, lost versions of who you used to be when you first watched this kid sling webs across a screen. You’ve seen your own share of difficult, unglamorous adult stuff since that first film. Watching him grow, in that context, means watching yourself grow too, and there’s real weight in getting to notice how far both of you have actually come.
The fact that the love story between Holland and Zendaya has also quietly blossomed into something real off-screen only deepens what’s happening on-screen. Two people who met on the MCU’s very first Spider-Man film grew up, together, into two of the biggest stars working today, and you can feel that history humming underneath every scene they share.
Holland no longer has the boyish charm here; you can see him applying what he has learned on The Odyssey and from Matt Damon here in real time as he oozes this mature movie star charisma that is more akin to Jason Bourne than Scott McCall.
His work is quite devastating and charming throughout, as he plays two very different characters here at times. When he is inside the mask, he really is Spider-Man, fully embodying this quippy, friendly neighborhood crime-fighting superhero. Spidey here is how you have probably always imagined him to be, the one you may run across in Queens, and that feeling is there for the film’s entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime, as Holland spends most of the movie in the suit. But then also, when he is Peter Parker, he is a very sad, lonely man.
The looks at Ned and MJ from across a room, the yearning and distant feeling all at once, the subtle, melancholic half-smile of a man watching friends he can no longer have. The heartache sits visibly on his face throughout, especially in scenes where he’s saying nothing at all. Grief and isolation have a way of hollowing a person out until they’re barely recognizable to themselves, and this film puts that transformation directly on screen. And that brings us to my biggest emotional takeaway from this film, why it resonates so well with me, and why Spider-Man has been an important character for me.
This is a movie that isn’t afraid to hit you with some emotional whiplash. One moment, MJ finds Peter’s letter, and he is confronted with his worst fears: that she really doesn’t remember him, let alone love him, and that everyone who loves him truly doesn’t remember him either. Zendaya and Holland both play it devastatingly well. And then, almost immediately, you get to see MJ, Peter, and Ned hang out together, and Peter, like the saddest boy, talks about how this is the most fun he’s had in years, and it’s just such a beautiful and real moment.
We often get so caught up in whatever life, work, and our worries and fears have in store for us that they push us down a very lonely path, a loneliness we feel even when we have people around us, and sometimes it’s hard to reach out. It just is.
And then, some random day, you hang out with your friends, doing nothing in particular, and it hits you: oh. Maybe this was the entire point the whole time. Maybe shutting yourself off was never the answer it felt like. You need community. You need to actually move forward instead of just existing inside the loneliness. Sometimes that will involve the people you already know, and sometimes it will involve people you haven’t met yet. But either way, there’s no shortcut around actually confronting the thing.
This film is, genuinely, a masterclass in depicting grief, and that’s exactly why it’s landing with so many people so well.
We mourn a lot of things, and sometimes, heck, we just mourn ourselves and the version of us we’re not anymore. Every single one of us has grieved something.
We’ve all pictured a version of our future that never quite arrived the way we imagined it, or we arrived somewhere and realized we’re simply not that same person anymore. You can grieve possibility itself, the life Peter never got to have, and watching that particular flavor of alone is genuinely heartbreaking. But he has to move forward anyway, has to find whatever it takes inside himself to accept the reality he’s actually standing in rather than the one he lost. And whatever else happens, he never once gives up, and that’s the real hope buried inside most of Peter Parker’s stories. You might lose yourself completely along the way, but eventually you find the strength to accept what’s actually in front of you.
You have that strength already, even if you can’t feel it yet. You will use it.
Credit to director Destin Daniel Cretton, who gives the MCU an emotional register it’s badly needed for a while now, and who somehow shows us this character in a way that nobody has managed to do so on the big screen before. His visual approach borrows the best instincts of both the Maguire and Garfield eras, folds in a touch of the Sony PlayStation games’ sensibility, and still finds room for a style entirely his own.
It’s worth saying, too, in the wider context of where this franchise has been sitting: this is one of the very few Marvel films since Endgame, particularly against the backdrop of a rough few years, that feels like it has genuine direction and quality behind it again. Watching it, there’s a specific, almost surprising feeling of oh, this is what a real film made by someone who actually understands both Spider-Man and filmmaking looks like, sounds like, moves like.
Remember Civil War or Winter Soldier, once treated as a genre high point? Those aesthetic choices do not translate well to 2026, and we should be allowed to expect more from these films by now. This one, with its instinct for practical effects over generic superhero CGI sludge, does exactly what the genre and this studio are capable of. It does it to perfection.
New York itself functions as a full character here, more than it ever has in a live-action Spider-Man film. Some of that realness comes down to just plain good casting, even in the smallest roles, people who feel like they belong in this specific New York rather than a backlot standing in for one.
We must also talk about the suit. There were several points during this film where the only thought in my head was simply “that’s a beautiful suit,” and I mean that as the highest of praise, because that suit is exactly the Spider-Man I’ve been picturing since childhood, comics and games and the old animated show all folded into one image, finally realized on screen. Peter Parker has leapt fully off the comic book page and landed, completely intact, on screen. Long live Peter Parker, indeed.
Quick note: The hospital scene might be one of my favorite scenes in any comic book film ever made, full stop.