Your Friendly Neighborhood Sequel

Spoilers … obviously.

As I’m writing this, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has already grossed $927,000,000, including setting the record for the highest domestic opening weekend of all time(!) with $360 million. It’s a box-office bonanza, and that’s evident if you’ve gone to any multiplex over the last handful of days.

I didn’t realize so many people—from toddlers to adults—owned Spider-Man shirts. And that isn’t a put-down in any sense, from someone who’s most certainly had his own growing up. It’s just startling to remember sometimes that Spider-Man and Batman are in a world of their own when it comes to superhero starpower. There are those two at the top of the heap and then everything else.

Which is why it’s so odd that Marvel is still getting in the way of its prize property.

From Spider-Man: Homecoming to the latest Brand New Day, Marvel loves to use its premier franchise as a jumping-off point and cinematic universe stepping stone. In Tom Holland’s first solo movie, he was lumped in with Iron Man, turning Tony Stark into a father figure of sorts and Happy Hogan into a handsome lothario(?) pining for Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May. And then Far From Home and No Way Home became folded into the S.H.I.E.L.D. storyline and commenced the multiversal Doctor Strange-esque chaos that is now a talking point of every Marvel film.

Thankfully, Brand New Day lowers the stakes (slightly) as Spider-Man tries to keep New York City clean before attempting to protect the Department of Damage Control (DODC) from an unknown body-hopping entity.

If you didn’t know from the hubbub surrounding the Sadie Sink casting and Disney Intellectual Property mishegoss, Sink is Jean Gray, and this is all a backdoor pilot of sorts for whatever X-Men films are on the way. And they will be here. Very soon.

Along with the X-Men gang, this movie throws in a Hulk—because of … let’s keep Mark Ruffalo doing something in the MCU(?)—as well as a PG-13 Jon Bernthal Punisher, who is probably having the most fun of anyone on set. There’s an entire montage of Spider-Man fighting local villains, and then we get sucked back into the Marvel of it all and the DODC and the mysterious Bill Metzger, along with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova/Black Widow.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these individual chess pieces, but when they’re all on screen during a never-slowing-down 145 minutes, it gets a bit exhausting. Plus, nobody can ever truly die in these movies when it’s all grist for the mill. The disasters get bigger and bigger, but the stakes are consistently lower when you can just bring anyone back at any time.

At this point, I liken Marvel to Saturday Night Live, something that I ultimately appreciate and am interested in behind-the-scenes-wise more than the actual content they put out. Every so often, there’s a “Wells for Boys,” “Mom Confession” or a legitimately good Marvel movie, but for the most part, the most interesting part is the rumors and the presumably toxic gossip.

Despite Marvel being the behemoth (both box-office-wise and critically) over the last decade, I still think the best recent movie to come out of either studio is the near-three-hour crime thriller that is The Batman, a hodgepodge of David Fincher serial killers and QAnon-esque conspiracy theorists in a grimy world. There’s a full story in there, as well as an actual tone from start to finish.

And yet, there’s one scene in it that doesn’t work at all, in which Barry Keoghan portrays the Joker for a minute or so, in an ostensible set-up to a future Batman movie starring the frequently-used cinematic villain. It’s almost out of a different film and feels like a studio note to create their own universe of sorts. Thankfully, the follow-up (whenever we finally get it) appears to be Joker-less, which is for the best so soon after a seemingly infinite number of portrayals.

The best parts of Brand New Day are when Spider-Man is allowed to be Spider-Man: Peter Parker’s anxiety in wanting friends vs. not wanting to endanger them, his own puberty-coded mutation struggles and his quest to be a solid guy despite his own flaws. That’s what Tobey Maguire’s characterization got right, and when Holland has a bit of room to breathe, he’s probably the closest to the Spider-Man from the comics we all know and adore.

Spider-Man has always been a symbol for New York and has been coded as such over the decades. At his core, he’s just a very smart but dumb kid running around Queens, trying to muster up the courage to kiss a girl from class.

It feels like we’re getting further and further away from Spider-Man. At this point, he’s a partial stand-in for Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and a tool of sorts to keep every other hero in Marvel’s repertoire afloat.

With the movie’s success, we’re in for more Holland Spider-Man (I would wager at least another two), which is overall a good thing. He and Zendaya obviously have incredible chemistry, and Destin Daniel Cretton’s direction was a step up from Jon Watts’ work in the last three movies.

I just wish they let the character exist on its own for a bit, but as we could see from the final post-credits stinger, there are more Spider-Men on the way. And more interplanetary travels to be documented.

We may never get a stand-alone friendly neighborhood story again.

At least until the next cinematic universe gets a chance.