Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

BRAVE NEW MOVIE REVIEW - SPOILERS AHEAD!

Tom Holland may have thwipped his way into the hearts of audiences over three films, but can his spidey sense and super agility help him navigate the slings and arrows of superhero fatigue? The film's been out a little while now so you probably already know the answer to that one, but stick around anyway, because we've got thoughts.

Here's the state of play. Brand New Day picks up with Peter Parker living in the wreckage of that memory-wiping spell at the end of No Way Home: no friends who know him, no support network, no safety net. Destin Daniel Cretton takes over the director's chair from Jon Watts, arrives with a promise to drag Spidey back down to street level where he arguably belongs, and brings Jon Bernthal's Punisher along for the ride, which is not a sentence anyone was writing about the Tom Holland era in 2017.

So the question we keep circling back to on this one is a film history question rather than a Marvel one. Superhero cinema has been ion the ropes a while now. Every genre cycle hits the same wall eventually: the westerns did it, the disaster movies did it, the found footage boom did it. The usual escape routes are to go smaller, go darker, or go weird. Brand New Day very deliberately picks the first two. Does going back to basics count as a reinvention, or is it just a franchise checking its own pulse?

In this one we get into whether the street-level pitch actually lands or just gets swallowed by the usual third-act action set pieces, what Bernthal brings to a Spider-Man film, whether stripping Peter of everyone he loves is genuinely brave, and where this sits against the Raimi and Webb runs when you line all three up properly.

Grab a seat, mind the webbing, and settle in.

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Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time. For more like this, dig into the back catalogue at JourneyThroughSciFi.com or sign up to the JTSF Logbook newsletter.