Does Spider-Man Make the Most of His Brand New Day?

Since its marketing cycle started, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been talked up as a soft reboot in many respects. This is, as Tom Holland’s said, a Spider-Man film for the fans, made clear with a focus on talking up the practical work and taking Peter Parker out of the Avengers’ orbit to focus on him as a person.

To watch this movie is like watching the end of the SpongeBob Squarepants episode “As Seen on TV,” where SpongeBob lets briefly cameoing in a Krusty Krab commercial go to his head and doesn’t do his job. Eventually, he’s pulled out of it by accidentally dropping burgers on the grill, with a crowd celebrating him for doing “what we’ve wanted all along!” You can easily see how this applies to Spider-Man: the Home trilogy, while commercially successful, has often felt like they were Spider-Man with several elements missing, either because they’d been repeated enough times to be meaningless, or because the writers seemingly weren’t interested in them.

A cynical read of Brand New Day would be to dub it “apology media,” which exists mainly as a gesture of goodwill to assure fans the creators are back on track after a divisive (sometimes toxically so) previous entry. Scream 7, Halo Infinite, and Rise of Skywalker are just some examples of an epidemic running through media, mostly through the 2020s. At worst, these works try for a “back to basics” approach that, regardless of whether it was actually needed, can feel insultingly insecure. In many instances, they require you to ignore the real world context of what’s going on: it’s hard to pretend Scream 6 or The Last Jedi warranted getting brushed off when they reviewed well and reached then-new box office benchmarks for their respective franchises.

The MCU Spider-Man already had its own apology with 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which apologized three times over—not just for the MCU Peter straying so far from his street-level hero vibes, but also for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 (2007) ending on a bittersweet note and the premature end of Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man films. The end of that film, wherein Holland’s Peter rocks a more classic costume and swings to deal with a simple robbery, was a promise that this Peter would be more about his city than about the universe going forward. If the next movie, which was announced before No Way Home could stretch its legs theatrically, didn’t actually take Holland’s Peter in a more scaled-back direction, what was even the point of all this?

Fortunately, Brand New Day makes good on this by jumping ahead four years to show Peter is now a beloved hero of New York, a thread we’ve seen play out in the Raimi and Webb films. It carries different weight here since, unlike his predecessor, this Peter fights actual villains like Scorpion and Tombstone, rather than generic crooks or criminals who’ll eventually be villains. Similar to Insomniac’s first Spider-Man game, this aspect of the film exists knowing the audience has a general idea of who Spider-Man is and what he’s about so it can get to telling the story it wants to tell. (It also continues the thread of Holland’s Spider-Man pulling from those games, just with an added emphasis on their attention on their narrative and emotional beats rather than moves this Peter can pull off during action scenes.)

Unlike the game, though, this part of the film can’t help but carry a bit of “here, damn” energy likely said with as much kindness as exasperation. Spider-Man: Brand New Day respects the Home trilogy, but also knows it needs to do some cleanup and readjusting if this Peter is to continue. In looking to improve on those films instead of erase or push them aside, it barely avoids being labeled apology media and gets to stand as a sequel. That’s an apparently tougher ask for Marvel than one would think, but it’s where we’re at. Audiences have made clear they like this stripped down, more miserable and down-to-earth Peter—here’s hoping that stays and we’re not years away from another installment that loses itself trying to bite off more than it can chew.

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