Summary
In December 2021,Spider-Man: No Way Homewas a massive financial success and widely regarded as a blockbuster triumph. For many, the Marvel Cinematic Universe venture served as a beacon that it was time to return to theaters after several months of COVID-19 lockdowns, which resulted in the film becoming the highest-grossingSpider-Manmovie to date. However, the success of the upcomingSpider-Man: Brand New Dayis anything but guaranteed.
Between the amount of time that has passed since the previous film, the overall waning popularity of the superhero genre, and the massive cliffhanger thatNo Way Homeleft audiences on, there are a lot of elements that the newSpider-Manis going to have to contend with to scale similar heights. Chief among these concerns will beBrand New Day’s ability to answer a simple question: can it make Spider-Man cool again?
The Origins of Spider-Man
When Spider-Man made his comic book debut in 1962, the character was a breath of fresh air in the crowded superhero genre. At that time, adult-age characters like Batman and Superman were dominating the market, even though the majority of the audience was far younger than these characters. Marvel legends Stan Lee and Steve Ditko saw this dissonance and opted to capitalize on it, giving young comic book readers a character who they could directly relate to.Peter Parker wasn’t a side characterlike Robin; he wasn’t someone the mainline hero was tasked with mentoring or taking care of. He was the central star of the piece and treated as such.
To support this approach, the earliest Spider-Man comics were grounded in a sense of realism and strife that were absent from several of the character’s contemporaries. Superman might have been trying to stop global threats on a weekly basis, but Spider-Man was just trying to stop muggers and pay his rent. Spider-Man was a street-level hero, and while that would change in the decades to come, the character has always flourished as one who is imminently relatable.
Spider-Man in Film
Cinematically, the character got off on the right foot with Sam Raimi’s originalSpider-Manin 2002. Raimi himself is an independent-minded, DIY kind of filmmaker, and brought that same rough-around-the-edges ingenuity to the character and caliber of the film. However, much like the comics, it wasn’t long beforethings got out of hand.
Barely a decade later, the character had been rebooted and was now dealing with far larger-scale threats and more bloated, gratuitous storylines.The Amazing Spider-Man 2was an infamously stuffed sequel that often shorted the titular character in favor of setting up superfluous characters, villains, and spin-offs. In addition, the film opted to remove Peter Parker’s everyman qualities, instead making him a hero whose strengths were defined by his magic, blood, and parentage.
As a result, the character desperately needed some retooling.The introduction of the characterinto the MCU, where he was played by Tom Holland, felt like it was the answer fans had long been waiting for. After all, Holland was the actor nearest the age of the character himself. But in execution, things were far more mixed. WhileSpider-Man: Homecoming,Spider-Man: Far From Home, andSpider-Man: No Way Homeall have their share of positive attributes, the filmsfailed to prioritize the relatabilityor small-scale tensions in Peter’s life. InHomecoming, his relationship with and funding from billionaire Tony Stark makes it hard to buy into any threads of him as a struggling teenager. ByNo Way Home, Peter was a globally famous figure in and out of the suit, who was coming up against several universe’s worth of world-ending stakes.
Spider-Man Came Home, But Lost Himself
Despite all the lip service paid to bringing Spider-Man home to the MCU and looking to avoid the pitfalls of prior iterations,the Tom Holland-starring filmshave ultimately proved incapable of tapping into the everyman quality that has defined Spider-Man’s success. Until now, that is. With the upcoming release ofSpider-Man: Brand New Day, it seems as though Tom Holland’s Peter Parker may get his chance to be a bona fide, relatable,friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
At the end ofNo Way Home, thanks to some Doctor Strange-assisted antics, the entire world’s memory of Peter Parker was erased, liberating Peter fromeverything the MCU had done with himpreviously. As such, the film ends with Peter living in a crumbling apartment, attempting to get his GED and sewing his own Spider-Man suit. Gone were his connections to Tony Star, gone was his multi-million-dollar suit, and gone were the multiversal stakes.
Spider-Man: Brand New Dayhas the opportunity to capitalize on this and make Spider-Man cool again. The character was introduced as a small-scale antidote to the overblown comic book storylines of the ’60s, and this new film has the opportunity to do the same thing for thecurrent state of superhero cinema. Slated for release in 2026, right in betweenAvengers: DoomsdayandAvengers: Secret Wars,Brand New Dayhas the chance to cut through the noise of a cluttered theatrical landscape and deliver something intimate, striking, and truly indebted to Spider-Man as a character.
