There is a particular kind of fatigue that only modern franchise filmmaking can produce. It isn’t the pleasant exhaustion that follows a great three-hour epic, which is the cinematic equivalent of leaving a Thanksgiving dinner unable to button your pants. It’s the drained feeling that comes from watching a movie assembled by committee, polished by marketing departments, and seemingly edited until an algorithm nodded in approval. Hollywood, increasingly, doesn’t make movies so much as content with opening weekends.
There are exceptions, of course. A24 still behaves like the odd little bookstore that somehow survives between two Starbucks, and Christopher Nolan continues to march through the multiplex as if studio notes were merely polite suggestions. But for every filmmaker chasing something strange or personal, there are a dozen productions that arrive feeling pre-chewed. They have spectacle without wonder, movement without momentum, and eyes that never quite sparkle. And no studio embodies this better than Marvel.
To me, the Marvel Cinematic Universe concluded with Avengers: Endgame. Everything afterward has felt less like an ongoing story than a corporation trying to remember why people fell in love with it in the first place. There have been brief flashes of life. Spider-Man: No Way Home turned nostalgia into genuine movie magic by inviting every cinematic Spider-Man to the party. Deadpool & Wolverine at least remembered that superhero movies could still be mischievous. But much of what has followed has resembled prestige television accidentally wandering onto the Hallmark Channel with a $250 million budget. So naturally, Marvel’s answer is to rewind the clock.
With Avengers: Doomsday looming on the horizon, and more familiar faces returning than a high-school reunion, the studio hopes nostalgia can once again function as both plot and emotional investment. Before that arrives, however, comes Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the ninth live-action solo Spider-Man film and Tom Holland’s fourth outing beneath the mask. Curiously, Marvel has abandoned the “Home” naming convention, perhaps because everyone has already gone home.
Holland remains an excellent Peter Parker. He possesses that rare ability to make awkwardness charming rather than exhausting, and his Spider-Man has always balanced adolescent insecurity with genuine heroism. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 may still sit atop the throne like cinema’s favorite neighborhood superhero story, but Holland made the character feel buoyant again after years of increasingly cluttered mythology. Unfortunately, Brand New Day mistakes repetition for comfort.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the filmmaker behind the remarkable Short Term 12, this should have been an exciting creative pairing. Short Term 12 remains one of the finest independent dramas of the last decade. It’s funny, heartbreaking, intimate, and deeply humane. Even Shang-Chi, despite being obligated to march through Marvel’s familiar digital fireworks factory, contained moments of personality and unexpectedly strong performances from Simu Liu and Awkwafina. Here, however, Cretton appears trapped inside Marvel’s increasingly rigid machinery. The result feels less like a film than another mandatory chapter in an ever-expanding corporate flowchart.
The story picks up several years after No Way Home, where Doctor Strange’s spell erased Peter Parker from everyone’s memory, including MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon). Peter now lives alone, fights crime, eats pizza, and broods with Olympic-level commitment. Gone is the energetic kid trying to survive high school. In his place is an oddly middle-aged Spider-Man who spends much of the film looking like he’s one Radiohead album away from reenacting Spider-Man 3, mercifully without the infamous dance number or gravity-defying emo haircut.
The premise suggests an intimate story about loneliness, identity, and adulthood. Instead, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t really Peter Parker’s movie. Like so many recent Marvel installments, Brand New Day exists primarily to introduce someone else. Watching the film, I was reminded of J.J. Abrams’ comically elaborate attempts to convince audiences Benedict Cumberbatch wasn’t playing Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. The secrecy eventually became more exhausting than the reveal itself. Marvel repeats that same trick here, treating an obvious introduction like it’s preserving the nuclear launch codes.
Then there’s the villain problem. Marvel has become oddly allergic to uncomplicated evil. Every antagonist now arrives carrying enough unresolved trauma to qualify for six seasons of prestige therapy. Somewhere along the way, comic-book villains stopped wanting to conquer cities and started wanting hugs. Enough is enough, alright. Sometimes a bad guy should simply enjoy being bad. No childhood flashbacks. No tortured monologues. No tragic misunderstanding. Just someone who wakes up, chooses violence, and clocks in for work. Michael Bay has built an entire career understanding this beautiful simplicity. Someone should give him Marvel’s phone number.
The action is professionally staged, though professionalism has become a low bar for superhero cinema. Spider-Man swinging between skyscrapers once inspired awe. Now it resembles seeing fireworks on the Fourth of July. Pleasant, certainly, but no longer surprising. One genuinely inspired wrinkle arrives when Peter doesn’t hesitate to seriously injure his opponents, forcing him to rethink how he fights. It’s funny, inventive, and refreshingly human. Naturally, the movie abandons the idea almost immediately.
The film truly comes alive whenever Jon Bernthal’s Punisher enters the frame. Bernthal injects the movie with something Marvel desperately lacks these days. And that’s danger. He doesn’t seem interested in selling toys or setting up Disney+ spin-offs. He simply behaves like a man who has wandered into the wrong cinematic universe and refuses to apologize for it. His early scenes with Holland possess real tension and odd-couple chemistry, although even Bernthal eventually becomes another exaggerated version of himself before the credits roll.
And then there’s Peter and MJ. Tom Holland and Zendaya continue to share effortless chemistry, which is the kind you can’t manufacture with chemistry reads or franchise planning meetings. Yet the film continually delays emotional payoff in favor of future installments, future crossovers, and future obligations. Marvel has become astonishingly good at promising tomorrow instead of delivering today. Ironically, one of the funniest exchanges belongs not to Peter and MJ, but to Peter and Ned casually quoting The Lord of the Rings. It lands because it feels spontaneous, human, and blissfully disconnected from whatever multiversal spreadsheet is driving the rest of the movie.
By the end of its bloated two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Spider-Man: Brand New Day hasn’t offended me nearly as much as it has exhausted me. It is competently assembled, occasionally amusing, and almost entirely forgettable. Even the once-sacred post-credit sequence has become an afterthought, which here is reduced to little more than a graphic on a screen, as if even Marvel couldn’t muster the energy to tease the next thing properly.
Perhaps that’s the most telling image in the entire film. The Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t need another crossover. It doesn’t need another nostalgic cameo or another multiversal emergency requiring fifteen movies and eight television series to explain. It needs silence. A long one. Ten years wouldn’t hurt. Because if Spider-Man: Brand New Day represents Marvel’s new beginning, it feels remarkably similar to the ending we’ve already watched thirty times before. The tragedy isn’t that superhero movies have become bad. It’s that they’ve become boring.
