Tripwire Reviews Spider-man: Brand New Day

Bland New Day

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at Spider-man: Brand New Day in cinemas now…
Spider-man: Brand New Day
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton

Stars: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Mark Ruffalo

It’s been ten years since Tom Holland first donned the spider costume in Captain America: Civil War and nine since Spider-man: Homecoming, his standalone big screen debut. At the end of No Way Home back in 2021, Parker is forced to remove himself from the world to save his friends. So Brand New Day opens with a New York that doesn’t know that he is Spider-man. He continues to operate as the hero but his friends including girlfriend Mary Jane Parker (Zendaya) are oblivious to his true identity. When he is forced by a new threat here, he decides to reveal his true self to them once again.

Holland has always been a decent but not great Spider-man. Brand New Day gives us a new threat, who I shall not name but is a revised big screen version of a well-known Marvel figure. It also features cameo appearances from Bernthal as The Punisher and Ruffalo as the Hulk. It also debuts a new Marvel Cinematic Universe organisation in the shape of Damage Control, headed up by William Metzger, best known as playing the archly sinister Seth Milchick in Apple’s cult TV show Severance.

So a number of years on from No Way Home, we have Brand New Day, a Spider-man film which is competent but rather unremarkable. The new villain here, who has been discussed online, is a decent debut but Bernthal has little to do onscreen except act as a rather weak foil to Spider-man and Ruffalo’s Hulk cameo is fairly pointless, adding little to proceedings. The irony here is that the two animated Spider-verse films feel far closer to the spirit of Spidey with that esprit de comics (that my Tripwire colleague Andrew Colman likes to talk about) than the Holland films. There are a few moments when it lifts itself a little but they are few and far between. Zendaya makes for a very bland and unengaging MJ and there’s very little chemistry between her and Holland despite the fact that they are a real-life couple.

What is also interesting is that as of this writing, this film has grossed an amazing (pardon the pun) $1bn at the box office after just seven days on release. One UK newspaper has predicted that it is likely to hit the $2bn mark. When it seemed that cinema was struggling to put bums on seats, this summer has had Nolan’s The Odyssey which is on $912m as of this writing and this film as well. It does prove that people still want to go to the cinema to see something that engages with modern audiences.

The success of films like this one does reflect the malaise with modern cinema. Brand New Day is a shiny but ultimately empty confection, offering us a story which is nothing more than an unimaginative twist on one we have seen countless times before in superhero movies. Frank Miller’s deadly ninjas The Hand, who made their comics debut in his Daredevil, make an appearance here but they come across as just a rather flimsy group of anonymous cookie cutter villains.

Brand New Day does set things up for Avengers: Doomsday, out in December, and for the return of a well-known Marvel group on the big screen. DC’s only big-screen outing this year is Supergirl, which did very disappointingly at the box office.

Spider-man: Brand New Day is a competent albeit too long superhero film but it is following on from its predecessor, No Way Home, which also grossed a very impressive $1.9bn worldwide. Spider-man films are critic proof so it doesn’t really matter what I say as this latest Spidey film is likely to be one of the biggest grossing films of 2026.

Holland is 30 years old now, so he’s beginning to get a little long in the tooth to play Peter Parker/ Spider-man. But all three of his Spider-man films have grossed over a billion dollars each which is a fairly remarkable statistic, so considering just how well the current film has done, this is not likely to be the last movie outing for Holland in the red superhero suit.

JOEL MEADOWS