Friendly Neighborhood Comeback

Damage Control isn’t just the site of much of the action in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it’s an all-too-obvious metaphor for a movie with a lot riding on its shoulders, coming after so many disappointing comic-book films — in the DC and Marvel cinematic universes — and an over-reliance on the multiverse and fan-pandering novelty.

The good news is that this hero is up to the task.

Brand New Day gets things back on track, delivering an emotionally rich and action-packed spectacle that’s bigger than previous outings and hugely satisfying, even if it feels a tad overstuffed. 

Picking up four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, this latest entry has Peter Parker (Tom Holland) dealing with the consequences of the choice he made at the end of that last film: Thanks to a spell cast by Dr. Strange, everyone has forgotten him entirely — not just that he’s Spider-Man, but that Peter Parker ever existed. He sacrificed his relationships to keep everyone he loves safe, but it’s made him lonely, since now he has no friends or family (you may recall that Aunt May died in No Way Home).

Anonymous and alone, Peter is now devoted full-time to protecting New York City (working with a detective played by The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zayas). And when he’s not web-slinging, he’s cyberstalking his former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend M.J. (Zendaya) on social media, and seeing how well they’re doing without him. Poor guy.

But then a bizarre string of crimes and the emergence of a terrifying new enemy who can control the minds of other people, and a transformation within himself that may be just as dangerous as the villain he’s trying to stop, force Peter to once again confront the eternal battle within so many super beings: Which comes first, the man or the hero? It’s a smart, emotionally grounded premise that builds naturally on No Way Home without relying on nostalgia or multiverse gimmicks to carry the story.

What immediately sets Brand New Day apart is that it’s really a Peter Parker movie disguised as a Spider-Man movie. In the time since the last film, Peter has grown up. He even jokes that he’s “not in high school anymore,” and Brand New Day embraces that evolution, giving him adult problems instead of teenage angst. This gives Holland the chance to play a more mature version of the character without losing the awkward charm that made him so likable in the first place. Holland continues to prove he was perfectly cast in the role, balancing humor, vulnerability, and quiet resilience in what may be his strongest performance as the character yet. As always, he sells the emotional stakes just as convincingly as the acrobatic ones. 

The secret weapon of Holland’s Spider-Man movies has always been that, beneath the superhero fireworks, they’re grounded in genuine emotion and — super stuff aside — relatable challenges. Brand New Day continues that tradition with a screenplay by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers that largely treats its characters like ordinary people in extraordinary situations. 

New director Destin Daniel Cretton also injects the franchise with fresh energy, balancing humor, heart, and some seriously inventive action sequences — particularly one towards the end that’s easily among the best superhero set pieces since the unforgettable bus fight in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which Cretton also directed. His fingerprints are all over this film, and the gritty, more authentic look he uses makes Brand New Day feel distinct from the previous trilogy rather than simply more of the same. (Much of the film was shot in Glasgow, Scotland, which helps, too.)

The supporting cast is packed with familiar faces and a few surprises that I won’t spoil. That said, if you’ve seen the film’s trailers or have been following its marketing campaign, you know about some of them. For example: Jon Bernthal’s Punisher (a.k.a. Frank Castle) is everything you’d hope for — intense, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore whenever he enters a scene. Bernthal (The Odyssey) has a remarkable ability to improve virtually any movie or TV show he appears in, and Brand New Day is no exception. 

(Contrast his performance with Jason Momoa’s as Lobo in Supergirl. Not even close.)

I also enjoyed seeing Colón-Zayas get a big-screen career boost, even though she disappears from the film about a third of the way in.

Part of the reason Colón-Zayas is sidelined is that there’s just a lot going on in Brand New Day. There are enough storylines and characters here to fuel two movies, and you can sometimes feel the narrative straining under the weight. At around the halfway mark, Peter and co. kind of take a break to catch their breath before the film suddenly kicks back into gear. Then that final act feels a little too eager to wrap everything up, and it tries to do too much. Brand New Day is a long movie, and it feels its two-and-a-half hours — particularly in that last third when it’s coming in for a landing.

Also, while you needn’t be a MCU completist to enjoy Brand New Day, it will be important to familiarize yourself with at least two things before seeing this latest film: The Punisher comic book from 2023 when Frank and Spidey do battle in Staten Island with a criminal organization known as the Hand, and Thunderbolts*, one of the best films of 2025, which reminded us that, when the fighting stops, superheroes are human beings who experience real emotions like loneliness and depression.

On that note, perhaps the biggest compliment I can give Brand New Day is that it remembers why audiences fell in love with Spider-Man in the first place. There’s a big Avengers movie coming out later this year, and yet, Brand New Day isn’t a movie obsessed with setting up that future project or checking off fan-service boxes (the film’s after-the-end-credits “scene” isn’t even worth sticking around for). It’s about a young man carrying impossible burdens while trying to do the right thing. In today’s superhero landscape, that almost feels revolutionary.

For the better part of a decade, superhero movies have been trapped in an arms race. Bigger multiverses. More cameos. More Easter eggs than an aisle at Target the week before Easter. Each release just another cog in a larger corporate machine. Brand New Day finally has the good sense to ask a simple question: What if we just made a really good Spider-Man movie?

No, Brand New Day isn’t perfect. But it’s one of Marvel’s most satisfying efforts in years — exactly the kind of reset this franchise, and perhaps the MCU more broadly, needed.

I’m giving it a B+.