Is the New Spider-Man Movie a Brand New Day in the MCU - Or Its Dark Night?

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is here, and it’s just offered Avengers: Doomsday the most dramatic lay-up it could have asked for.

What this means for the MCU going forward will be fascinating to see. Narratively speaking, it feels like both a fresh start for the MCU as well as the beginning of the darkest moment before the dawn.

With Doomsday now just a little over four months away, let’s look at how much of a turning point Brand New Day is for Tom Holland’s web-slinger and what it means for the franchise at large. For those who've yet to swing into their nearest cinema, we've kept this article as spoiler-free as possible, though there is light discussion of certain plot points and characters. 

Is Brand New Day the MCU’s Dark (K)Night?

After seeing above-average movies like Thunderbolts* and Fantastic 4: First Steps fail to make a huge impact last summer, a lot was riding on the success of Tom Holland’s fourth standalone Spider-Man. While it’s probably still too early to say, the energy around Brand New Day already feels palpable.

The key reason for this is how seamlessly director Dustin Daniel Cretton’s movie has cast aside the shiny tech that’s been a core element (and occasional crutch) of the MCU since as far back as Iron Man and replaced it with the volatile, dangerously unpredictable, and potentially limitless world of mutations.

With this, Cretton's movie gives us the first fully Hulkified Bruce Banner since Infinity War as well as the MCU's first X-Person, and we will likely meet the rest of that group's new members before the end of Secret Wars. With any luck, this will also mean the return of morally complex stories about mutant/human relationships, and all the allegories about prejudice and xenophobia that usually come with them—which, given the state of the world, would be interesting to see being explored in some of the year's biggest movies.

This will also mean a switch from the kind of comic book villains that Spidey takes care of at the start of the movie. The trailers had slyly been suggesting that Brand New Day would be a little more like Daredevil or the recent Spider-Man video games—both street-level crime stories with local stakes and eccentric bad guys (including the arrival of Michael Mando’s Scorpion, who was teased all those years ago in the Homecoming post-credits scene).

This turned out to be a red herring. Spider-Man deals with most of them in the opening minutes, and the only time he has to fight any of them again is when they’re under a mysterious character's spell. This suggests that the days of Galactus, Thanos, the multiverse, and magic are coming to an end, and that the villains of the MCU going forward will either be anti-mutant humans (like Bill Mertzek’s DODC) or anti-human mutants—or some unholy alliance of the two. 

Brand New Day Is Anchored By Emotional Growth

Along with introducing the stimulating world of mutants, Brand New Day also allows Peter Parker, Frank Castle (who was last seen murdering around 70 people in less than an hour in Punisher: One Last Kill) and the mysterious hooded character who begins the movie as a villain, only to find a kind of shared closure to their various traumas, finally allowing them to move on with each other's support and friendship. 

This gives the movie a sense of growth, maturity and resolution that’s been lacking in recent MCU movies, where themes of loss and trauma have lingered for too long in the post-Blip era. Whisper it, but it might even be a while before we see someone visit a grave again in one of these movies—although I am curious if Aunt May and Maria Castle are buried in the same cemetery... 

There will always be room for moments of loss and grief in the MCU, but like Peter at the end of Brand New Day, who decides to talk to Ned instead of visiting May again, there’s a sense that this franchise is ready to move on, too.

Christopher Nolan's Influence On Brand New Day

In the lead-up to the July double-header of The Odyssey (in which Holland plays Telemachus) and Brand New Day, Holland was open to talking about bringing Cristopher Nolan’s influence into the production of Brand New Day—allegedly pushing things back by up to six months as a result.

Speaking to GQ, the actor said that he wanted to adopt Nolan’s "purposeful style” instead of the occasionally rushed on-set rewrites that he’d gotten used to on previous Marvel movies. How that affected the final product exactly is hard to say at this point, but there is definitely more than a hint of Nolan’s presence here—from the muscular action sequences (that tank chase is pure Dark Knight Rises) to reduced use of green screen to the relentless forward momentum and gradually revealing plot.

This is something of a full circle moment for the MCU—a franchise that, at least in its early days, felt like a colourful alternative (if not all-out antidote) to the brooding blockbusters that dominated the era's multiplexes. More than most, Nolan’s Batman movies influenced that change of direction in Hollywood at the beginning of the ‘10s—think titles like Deathly Hallows, Breaking Dawn, Dark of the Moon—to the point that the promise of a “dark” or “gritty” retelling or direction was usually a good reason to run for the hills.

Brand New Day is darker and more mature, but it earns that description without forsaking the 'gee-wizz!' fun that made Holland’s Spider-Man movies so beloved to begin with. 

Tom Holland Rises to The Occasion

For all the qualities of this movie as a big-screen entertainment, Brand New Day was always going to live or die on Holland's performance, but he more than meets the moment; revitalising his Peter Parker at a point where others have gone stale.

In Brand New Day, Peter looks believably heartbroken, world-weary and much more slouched around the shoulders. His needing to stretch before fighting is played for laughs (you probably saw it in the trailer), but it's very noticeable that the suit doesn’t cling to him in quite the same way that it used to. Holland turned 30 this summer (roughly the same age that Tobey Maguire was in Spider-Man 2), and that bod is starting to show its first shades of dad—which I’m kind of here for.

All this projects a vulnerability we’ve not yet seen in his Peter Parker outside of that unforgettable “Mr Stark?” moment on Titan at the end of Infinity War, and Cretton uses it to full effect. Holland’s two biggest scenes with Zendaya are very challenging in very different ways—the first is like something out of Obsession, the second an incredibly affecting heart-wrencher. He rises to the occasion on both counts. It’s probably the best performance of his career. 

Had they done the unthinkable at the end, it would have made some kind of narrative sense. But I’m perfectly happy to know that there’ll be at least one more outing for Holland’s web-slinger.