I’ve seen a lot of Spider-Man films in my time, following the web-swinger since the glory days of having director Sam Raimi. So, by now, I have a pretty good sense of what makes a good Spider-Man film. And unfortunately, Spider-Man: Brand New Day isn’t quite what I’d qualify as good, but it comes pretty close. What’s important is the genuinely ambitious idea buried at its center.
Peter Parker and Spider-Man Are Out of Sync
Picking up where No Way Home ended, Peter Parker is now on his own without his Aunt May. But more than that, he’s also without friends, having had Doctor Strange erase his identity from the minds of everyone—including his closest friend, Ned, and girlfriend, MJ—all to save the world. Brand New Day finds our superhero stepping into his own, living a lonely life to protect the people he loves from anyone who might hurt them to get to him — essentially walking in the footsteps of the classic Tobey Maguire Spider-Man.
Brand New Day is ultimately a fresh retread of Spider-Man 2, and it arrives at the same conclusion. The plot is just dressed up differently. Tom Holland’s Peter Parker can’t live the hero’s life alone without help any more than Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker could in 2002. This time, the story still resonates.
In this story, Peter swings into action, fighting villains from Scorpion to Tombstone. When he’s not wearing the mask, he’s thinking about his friends and wishing he could somehow have them back. He even goes so far as to see them at a party they’re hosting. But because he can’t tell them the truth, he goes home sad and torn. He’s in collaboration with the police, which is a departure from that relationship in previous installments.
But as he digs deeper into his loneliness, something strange begins to happen to Spider-Man. He begins to evolve, his spider-sense overloaded and unreliable. His strength also increases, turning him almost into a liability for the police, who are there to help him. His powers are changing in ways he doesn’t fully understand (the trailers suggested this metamorphosis would play a much bigger role than it actually does in the film). There’s a fascinating idea buried here. Peter Parker is trying to live entirely as Spider-Man, attempting to cut himself off from friendship, intimacy, and the ordinary human connections that gave Peter Parker room to breathe. Simultaneously, Spider-Man is physically changing. In other words, the two identities fall out of sync. Peter cannot become whole as Spider-Man while he’s trying to amputate Peter Parker from his life.
To its credit, the film clearly wants the audience to understand this connection between Peter’s need for human relationships and the natural evolution of his identity as Spider-Man. His emotional identity and superhero identity basically need to realign for the problems to cease. The problem is that the movie doesn’t explore the concept deeply enough. Peter’s evolving abilities become complications, as he chooses to fight despite clearly being off his game. His spider-sense is out of wack, and he blacks out in self-defense, entering this beast mode, laying waste to his enemies with heightened precision. These instances of internal conflict that could have been unsettling or revealing are played instead for humor.
This is where Brand New Day falls short of classic status because it’s not what the story needs. The movie knows where Peter needs to go emotionally. It just doesn’t know when to go there or how to get him there for optimal effect. There’s too much screentime given to Peter wanting his friends back. The problem isn’t simply that MJ and Ned are absent from Peter’s life. It’s that Brand New Day relies on the audience feeling their absence when these relationships never got the development they needed in previous installments. Too much of this material falls flat because the movie tells us what Peter has lost without making us feel the magnitude of that loss. It also doesn’t help that the acting from the supporting cast isn’t convincing enough to buy that MJ and Ned don’t remember Peter. The real emotional journey is in Peter’s refusal to accept the sacrifice he made in No Way Home and gradually developing towards acceptance of a future without MJ.
Eventually, the movie gets there. When MJ finally tells Peter that she doesn’t love him, something changes. Peter is finally free to let her go. Had the film established earlier and more painfully that MJ genuinely doesn’t know Peter anymore—that whatever they had really is gone—his eventual acceptance could have landed much harder in this scene near the third act. Peter’s journey would have then had a clearer progression: denial, longing, confrontation, grief, and finally acceptance. The film instead spends too long circling the loss before forcing Peter to face it.
Once it does, though, Peter begins embracing both sides of himself.
A Mystery That Shows Its Hand Too Soon
In some respects, this retreads the path of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 2, but it works because Peter Parker and Spider-Man finally stop pulling in opposite directions. His upgraded powers come roaring back into focus. What initially appeared to be a random mutation suddenly feels connected to something more meaningful: Peter becoming whole again. And it’s here that Brand New Day introduces one of its most interesting ideas—and misses one of its biggest opportunities.
Before Peter knows he’s dealing with Jean Grey, he has to figure out what kind of power he’s encountering in the first place. It’s telepathy. But how does it work? What’s its range? Who is using it? Where is it coming from? For a while, Peter doesn’t know. Those questions give Brand New Day all the ingredients for a genuinely compelling superhero mystery. The movie could have made Peter—and us—investigate the phenomenon piece by piece. And this is where the film should have trusted its audience more. The scene between Jean and her sister Sarah at the park should have appeared much earlier in the movie.
Don’t tell us she’s Jean Grey. Don’t explain Sarah is Jean’s sister. Don’t tell us why we’re watching them. Just show us two sisters having a conversation in a park and move on. Let the scene feel out of place. Let it bother us.
Then introduce the strange telepathic activity. Let Peter determine that the power is telepathy. Let him experiment with its range and gradually narrow down what he’s dealing with. Now the audience has information that doesn’t appear to connect yet: a strange scene between two sisters, an unknown telepath, Peter’s increasingly unreliable spider-sense, and Damage Control stepping in to help. Let us piece it together.
Meanwhile, Damage Control should have been written far more convincingly as an organization trying to help Peter. That’s the golden opportunity Brand New Day misses. If Damage Control genuinely appeared to be an uneasy but useful ally, Jean Grey could function as the apparent threat while Damage Control quietly became the real one. Peter—and therefore the audience—could spend much of the movie trying to understand this frightening telepathic presence while believing Damage Control is helping him contain it. And Peter’s spider-sense could have made that deception even better. It shouldn’t scream at him that Damage Control is evil, ruining the mystery. Just give him a tingle. Something small. Someone from Damage Control walks into the room, and Peter pauses. Something feels wrong. Maybe his spider-sense flickers and disappears. Maybe he looks over his shoulder, and there’s nothing there.
Peter knows he can’t completely trust these people. He just doesn’t know why.
That’s an important distinction because Peter Parker shouldn’t be naive. He’s been through too much by this point to blindly trust an organization like Damage Control. But he can make the wrong conclusion from incomplete information. And because his powers are already changing, Peter has every reason to question himself. Is his spider-sense detecting Damage Control? Is Jean’s telepathy interfering with it? Is this another symptom of his metamorphosis? Is the danger coming from somewhere else entirely?
Suddenly, Peter’s evolving abilities aren’t just an inconvenience during action sequences. They’re part of the mystery. Then comes the first reveal, the mysterious telepath is the woman from the park. And Sarah is her sister. That seemingly disconnected scene from earlier in the movie instantly snaps into place.
Oh.
That’s why they showed us that.
That’s the kind of payoff that rewards an audience for paying attention. We weren’t denied the information. We had it all along. We simply didn’t understand what it meant yet. And just when we think we’ve solved the mystery by identifying Jean, the movie could turn the entire thing over again. Jean isn’t the real villain. It’s Damage Control.
Now Peter realizes his spider-sense wasn’t failing him as completely as he thought. It had been warning him all along—just not about the person he assumed it was warning him about. That’s how Jean Grey could have worked brilliantly as a red herring without the movie cheating. The clues were there. Sarah was there. Jean. Damage Control. Peter’s spider-sense. We simply misunderstood how the pieces connected.
Instead of withholding the solution from the audience, Brand New Day could have hidden it in plain sight. And what’s frustrating is how perfectly that structure would fit the larger story. Peter spends this entire movie struggling with perception. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to his powers. He doesn’t completely understand what his spider-sense is telling him. He doesn’t understand Jean. He doesn’t understand Damage Control. And on a much deeper level, he doesn’t yet understand what his life is supposed to look like without MJ and Ned.
Peter’s problem isn’t that he lacks information. It’s that he hasn’t learned how the pieces fit together yet. The audience should have been allowed to experience that with him. That missed opportunity also hurts the eventual Damage Control reveal because instead of making Peter look like someone who sensed the danger but misinterpreted it, he can come across as strangely naive for trusting people he already has plenty of reason not to trust.
The better version preserves Peter’s intelligence. He knows something is wrong. We know something is wrong. Neither of us knows exactly what. That’s suspense.
Unfortunately, Brand New Day too often chooses explanation over discovery.
Jean, herself, still works, particularly once Peter finally confronts her. Don’t expect Xavier to show up in this film, but Peter and Jean’s heart-to-heart steals the show. Peter is uniquely positioned to understand something about Jean that almost nobody else can. Peter’s entire journey as Spider-Man began on the support of Aunt May. For a movie obsessed with including Peter Parker in the Spider-Man hero equation, putting Aunt May next to Jean Grey confronts the scared child underneath the powerful mutant. It’s one of the moments where Brand New Day finally capitalizes on the complexity it has been reaching for throughout the film.
So basically, Brand New Day partially succeeds on an emotional level because it knows where to go emotionally without always knowing when to go there or how. It hits emotional beats that truly matter, as No Way Home did, but fails to structure that depth in a way that fully capitalizes on all the complexity and layers it ambitiously tries to jam into this movie.
Finally, Hulk Feels Like Hulk
Despite the uneven emotional material, the film is considerably more confident when its superheroes are allowed to simply feel superhuman.
And nowhere is that more obvious than with the Hulk. Ironically, this is where previous Marvel films featuring the character have always—and I mean always—failed by comparison. For whatever reason, in this film, Hulk is finally allowed to truly be the Hulk: massive, powerful, and devastatingly strong. He towers over Spider-Man like never before, able to handle massive weights of concrete tied to his feet and throw Peter around like a rag doll. His strength isn’t merely something characters talk about. You feel it.
Where was this Hulk when Thanos was a threat?
His strength and menace are felt here in a way they weren’t in some of the much bigger installments of the MCU.
Spider-Man himself is also finally allowed to show off his powers. His agility and combat strength occasionally make Andrew Garfield’s and even Tobey Maguire’s iterations of Spider-Man feel reserved—except, of course, for the train sequence in Spider-Man 2. That will never be topped.
So credit where credit is due.
Don’t Just This Movie by Its Subtitle
Spider-Man: Brand New Day sounds like a corporate-safe title, but that doesn’t accurately reflect how surprisingly ambitious the film tries to be. This is a movie about loneliness, identity, sacrifice, friendship, perception, and whether Spider-Man can truly exist without Peter Parker. That’s a much more interesting movie than the title suggests.
Unfortunately, its screenplay isn’t always as good as its ideas. The frustrating thing isn’t that Brand New Day lacks interesting pieces. It has almost all of them. Peter’s loneliness. His evolving powers. An unreliable spider-sense. A mysterious telepath. Jean and Sarah. Damage Control. MJ and Ned. Hulk. And, ultimately, Peter’s need to reconcile the man underneath the mask with the superhero swinging above the city.
The pieces are there. The movie just puts too many of them together for us.
A Better Idea Than a Screenplay
Where the film fails to build intrigue, it makes up for it by hitting emotional beats that feel true. Where its relationships aren’t developed deeply enough to make Peter’s loneliness devastating, the underlying idea behind that loneliness remains compelling. And where its screenplay struggles to bring everything together, the third act offers glimpses of the Spider-Man movie Brand New Day could have been from the beginning.
It’s a movie with a better idea than it has a screenplay.
But it’s a pretty good idea.