Review: SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY (2026)

I’ve written a lot about Superman in the last couple of years, but my favorite superhero is Spider-Man. Often those two characters are neck-and-neck, but Spider-Man usually wins the contest by dint of being the first superhero I claimed as my own. I’ve mentioned this before, and tell the story in more detail at the beginning of my forthcoming book,1 but in short: I saw Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) on opening night sort of by accident, with no prior attachment to the character, and walked out feeling like I’d received divine revelation. Spider-Man was, quite literally, a superhero like me: a bespectacled, brown-haired nerd boy who made jokes to get through scary situations, had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and whose gut instinct was to help instead of fight. Watching that movie made me feel what I would later recognize as the first stirrings of vocation: a desire to change the world for the better, to dedicate myself to doing good even at great personal cost.

Superman has all of that, too, but what makes Spider-Man so appealing (especially when you’re a teenager) is the angst. Becoming Spider-Man doesn’t fix Peter’s life; in many ways it makes it much, much worse while also saddling him with an unfathomable moral burden that he can never lift. Peter knows that being Spider-Man is a dangerous and thankless job, that his good works will be met with derision, suspicion, and violence more frequently than cheers. But he also knows that if he simply sat on the sidelines and did nothing with his powers, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. More than any other superhero, Spider-Man expresses the weight and grace of conscience. You can never fix the world, and your best efforts will never be enough; but trying anyway is the most worthwhile thing you can do with your life.

You can interpret that as an existentialist position but you know me, folks: I see it as profoundly Catholic. Not that Spider-Man is Catholic (as someone whose first Spider-Man comics were all by Brian Michael Bendis, I’m irreversibly conditioned to see Spider-Man as Jewish) but you can see why his whole deal would appeal to me. I have a big Spider-Man poster in my office at school, a reminder that the young people I work with are also doing their best to figure out what to do with their burgeoning gifts, and how they’ll have a positive impact on the world. Not to mention that quaint idea that the more powerful you become, the more responsible you should feel for your fellow human beings.

Spider-Man means a lot to me, which has made the MCU Spider-Man movies extremely frustrating. I enjoyed Homecoming quite a bit and Far From Home more than a lot of folks, but the bloated, ponderous No Way Home left me feeling wrung out and empty. After seeing the latter film in 2021, I came to the conclusion that no one at the MCU seemed to understand what makes the character special or interesting, other than him being young, “nice,” and ““funny.”” Spider-Man is Marvel’s flagship character, but for some reason his movies are largely about Tony Stark. Not to get “back in my day we had proper Spider-Men,” but back in my day Peter was racing across town trying (and failing) to deliver pizzas on time while the bank forces his elderly widowed aunt out of her home. These days Peter’s got an AI assistant and a 3D printer that can make anything and six different suits with wings and claws and frets about whether he and all of his friends will get into MIT.2 Even the way the film brings the character “back to basics” is as convoluted and absurd as can be.

We did get a great Spider-Man movie in the last decade (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), but my expectations for the live action stuff had only diminished. The trailers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) didn’t do much to ease my worries. More cameos? More franchise table-setting? A plot built around the erased-memories stuff that I disliked so much from the last movie? I’m also willing to extend a lot of grace to director Destin Daniel Cretton because I love Short Term 12 (2013) but I also watched his previous MCU outing, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Confidence was not at an all-time high.

But sometimes life surprises you, like a radioactive spider chomping on your hand during a school field trip. And no one was more surprised than me when I realized that Brand New Day is the most I’ve enjoyed a Spider-Man movie (or an MCU movie in general) in a long, long time.

As ridiculous as the path to getting there was, resetting Peter to a scrappy, local hero does the character a ton of favors. This is the most convincing Holland’s ever been playing Peter’s angst, his constant battle with self-doubt. Spider-Man’s reputation is at an all-time high, but Peter Parker has never been lonelier. That’s the sort of tension that makes these stories work, the human heart that we always need to hear beating under the red-and-blue suit. He’s carrying a noble-but-terrible weight and doesn’t feel like he can share it with anyone: those are much easier stakes to root for than “will we all get into MIT?”

Yes, this film continues the trend of having Spidey interact with older superheroes from other movies, a thing that was becoming a real drag in the previous three entries.3 But it works here! You could easily cut out the Hulk stuff and make this movie shorter (it’s about 30 minutes shorter than The Odyssey, which is absurd), but it’s always good to see Ruffalo and I was genuinely affected by the tragic turn his story takes. And Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is such a fantastic addition that, despite knowing this would be a bad idea, I left the theater hoping that he shows up in all of these from now on. The characters have a spectacular dynamic, informed by their shared sense of loss as much as their conflicting crimefighting ideologies.4 I rolled my eyes when I saw him in the trailer, but their interactions were among my favorite stuff in the movie!

And sure, there’s an annoying amount of franchise-building happening with Sadie Sink’s character and I don’t think they ever really reckon with how careless she is with human life for three quarters of the movie. But it works because Sink is really excellent in the role: terrifying, funny, vulnerable. I feel like people turned on Sink a little because of The Whale or maybe latter-day Stranger Things, but I didn’t watch either of those and am unburdened by such prejudices.5 I have full faith in the MCU to render any putative future films featuring her character in the most boring and formulaic ways possible, but if they don’t then hers is a strong performance to build a franchise around.

And finally, the memory-erasing stuff. Instead of dipping back into the multiverse, this film instead uses it as a means of exploring Spider-Man’s core misbelief: namely, that he has to do this all on his own. He blames himself for his foundational trauma, so of course he believes that he has to shoulder all of the responsibility of making things right again. He believes he’s caring for people by keeping them at a distance, carrying the burdens on his own. (You might assume that this is another reason I relate to the character, and you’d be correct). Superman has also lost people and also has a fundamental belief in his individual moral responsibility to help others. But the big difference between Superman and Spider-Man is that Superman never forgets he has a family, and Spider-Man always does.

Consequently, it’s a cliche to have yet another Spider-Man movie where he learns to rely on others… but when it’s done well it always, always works on me. Brand New Day does it quite well. Part of this is that the cast has matured (although Zendaya, of course, has been batting at a higher average than everyone else for years). And part of it, I think, is credit to Cretton who is good with emotional storytelling. Unlike Shang-Chi this doesn’t require him to navigate too much frantic CGI action (not his strength) but he does give us a few good webslinging scenes (a series first!) and, hilariously, a little more Wuxia, just for fun.

I saw this movie with a friend, and as the credits rolled I turned to him and said, almost baffled: “That felt like a Spider-Man movie.” I think any reports of this being a, ahem, “brand new day”6 for the MCU are overblown — it’s got too many of the franchise’s endemic flaws for me to get that optimistic. But they finally got Spider-Man right, and that’s enough for a solid thumbs up from your friendly neighborhood film critic.

Things Seen & Heard

• Spider-Man recommendations: Ultimate Spider-Man by Brian Michael Bendis with principal artists Mark Bagley, Stuart Immonen, and David Lafuente over the course of the run; Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley (I think I heard Zdarsky’s run on the main title was good, too); the early Lee/Ditko and Lee/Romita stuff is a lot of fun; and if, like me, you prefer your superhero stories to really be about teen drama, check out the short-lived Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, by Sean McKeever, Takeshi Miyazawa, and David Hahn.

• I didn’t mean for this newsletter to become mostly new release reviews for the summer, but it was fun that it worked out that way. At the same time, I’m looking forward to giving my brain a break from arthouse movies like Spider-Man and Supergirl next week to cover the summer’s biggest popcorn blockbuster: Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.