The best Spider-Man movie of all time, in my opinion, remains Spider-Man 2 with Tobey Maguire. The single most emotionally devastating Spider-Man scene ever filmed is still the death of Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Those two moments resonate for the exact same reason: they cut straight to the core of why Spider-Man works better than almost any other superhero. He is a genuinely good person who cannot have or keep the good things in his life because he is a good person. That contradiction is the entire engine of the character.
Superman and Batman both suffered tragedy, but they operate from permanent advantages. Superman does not even remember Krypton and is largely loved as a symbol. Batman lost his parents, yet he was left with the fortune to fuel his mission. As the saying goes, Bruce Wayne is the mask. Peter Parker gets none of that. He is brilliant, he is responsible, and the universe keeps docking him for it. That is why the character hits different.
Spider-Man: Homecoming understood this better than any of the later Tom Holland films. Stripping the Stark tech away and forcing Peter to operate as a kid with homemade gear was the right instinct. The next two movies drifted from that idea. Brand New Day finally swings back to the essence.
Four years after the events of No Way Home, the world has forgotten Peter Parker. He is living alone, operating as a full-time Spider-Man, and the pressure of watching the people he loves move on without him is starting to break something open inside him. Director Destin Daniel Cretton and the writers lean into an older, more worn-down version of the character—the mid-20s Peter who has already lost too much. That is the sweet spot for the best Peter Parker stories. The 1990s comics run and the animated series understood it. This movie finally does too.
It felt like watching an arc from the 90s Animated Series which was some of the best Spider-Man storytelling of all-time.
The film shows, in greater detail than any previous MCU Spider-Man entry, that Peter is still a genius with or without money or fancy suits. That intelligence has always been a core personality trait, and here it is allowed to breathe. He feels like a young man who has been through real trauma and is trying to function anyway. Tom Holland has never played the character with this much quiet weight.
The first stretch of the movie is its weakest. It takes its time establishing how Peter has spent the last four years, complete with a montage of Spider-Man doing Spider-Man things and a surprising number of costumed meetings that feel oddly bureaucratic for a guy in a full spider suit. There are also several MCU crossovers and a stack of villains that feel like they were included more for comic-book fan service than narrative necessity. Five or six antagonists is a lot when one or two focused threats would have served the story better. Some of those early sequences simply take too long to get the engine running.
Also there were way too much in the promotional material in the actual movie. I understand you are trying to promote, but certain things would have been better left out. I would have prefer none of the actual Hulk fighting scenes or many of the scenes with MJ should have been left to be revealed in the movie and could have been shown in different ways.
Then Peter sees MJ and Ned at their new apartment and watches MJ kiss her new boyfriend. Everything changes. The emotional response is physical, almost involuntary—the same way Tobey Maguire’s body reacted when he saw MJ get engaged and Harry slap him in Spider-Man 2. From that moment forward, Brand New Day hits another gear and stays there.
The final hour and a half contains some of the strongest individual scenes in any Spider-Man movie. The interactions land with real force. There are multiple misdirections that pull at the heart without feeling cheap. One sequence, placed dead in the middle of the film, was acted so precisely that the woman sitting next to me started openly weeping. I could only sit there and silently clap. That is rare.
Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is a particular highlight. The chemistry between Frank Castle and Spider-Man is so sharp that people were walking out of the theater talking about a dedicated Punisher/Spider-Man team-up movie. Those scenes work because both characters are allowed to be themselves without soft-pedaling the friction. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is more mixed. The action is excellent and it is genuinely good to see the real Hulk on screen again after so many years, but the section feels undercooked. It is shorter than it should be, and the film offers almost no explanation for how he arrived or what he actually remembers. Something is still better than nothing, but it leaves you wanting more.
Sadie Sink is the biggest pleasant surprise. I had never watched Stranger Things, so I came in cold. Marvel and Sony are still protecting the full identity of her character, but most people will guess it quickly enough. What matters is the performance. She is excellent, and the chemistry with Holland is immediate and specific. I hope we get more of the two of them in future films because whatever this is, it works.
Brand New Day does not have the pure “wow” factor of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire stepping through the multiverse. It is not the best Spider-Man movie ever made. What it is, however, is the most mature, most heartfelt, and most emotionally coherent Spider-Man film of this generation. It understands that the character’s power comes from the cost of doing the right thing, not from the spectacle of swinging between skyscrapers. For the first time in a while, I left a Spider-Man movie actively rooting for the guy underneath the mask rather than just the icon with an ending that had me saying HELL YEAH!.
Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is back in the right place.
8.5 out of 10 BSO stars.
