Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
[Rated PG-13] 2hr 25min
Action/Adventure, Sci-Fi
★★★★
“…I’m not just Peter Parker. I’m Spider-Man. And sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing, even if it breaks Peter Parker’s heart.”
Four years after making the entire world forget who he is in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker continues to struggle with his personal life since he no longer has any real connections with anyone, so he puts all his time and energy into protecting New York City as Spider-Man. However, his mental state gets significantly worse when he sees his old high school friends graduate college and move back to New York, which ends up causing major physical changes to his spider abilities. As a result, he has trouble dealing with a dangerous new threat to the city and must find new ways to overcome the increasing number of challenges he faces.
This film provides a fantastic, definitive portrayal of Spider-Man that perfectly represents who he is as a character. It highlights his day to day street-level crime fighting, presents a larger threat that requires additional assistance to defeat, and explores how being a superhero affects him as a person. This allows all facets of the character to be put on full display within one viewing experience, which enriches the film in ways that no other Spider-Man film has done before. While the story itself is fairly standard for a superhero movie, its the characters and their interactions with each other that really enhance it to become something more. Tom Holland easily gives his best performance as Spider-Man, and Sadie Sink makes a phenomenal new addition to the MCU cast. Despite being a little clunky in its execution at times in terms of its themes and pacing, the overall experience of this film is genuinely great, and it offers the best entry in the MCU since Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
I recommend Spider-Man: Brand New Day to anyone who’s a fan of Spider-Man and enjoys his previous MCU films, as this latest installment greatly expands on important plot points and characterizations from those movies. It also benefits from having seen various other MCU projects due to their relevance to this particular story, but they’re definitely not necessary to understand the overall narrative. The beginning of this movie provides just enough context so that most people can still follow the plot regardless of which films they’ve previously seen.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theaters. Click here to watch the Official Trailer.
– Review by Will Hopper