Full spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day from here on out, including the post-credit. Go watch it. Come back.
About two hours into this movie, I leaned over to my wife in the dark and said, “This could lose 20 or 30 minutes.” I hadn’t read a review. I hadn’t seen a take. Nobody handed me that. I just felt it.
And then the next day I find out Destin Daniel Cretton already did it. The assembly on this movie ran about 170 minutes, and what you watched is 145. He took out almost exactly the amount of time I was sitting there in the dark guessing at, and he did it before any of us ever saw a frame. He’s on the record saying the length is right where it should be, and that there’s almost nothing left on the cutting room floor.
That stopped me. Because if you cut the 25 minutes and it still plays like the 25 minutes are in there, then the 25 minutes were never the problem. Every one of us complaining about the length of this movie, me in that theater included, has been complaining about a number. It was never a number. It’s the order.
The Bored Guy and the Depleted Guy
Let me walk you through what this movie is actually doing to you, because I’ve been chewing on it for a day and I think I’ve got it.
You get a set piece. It’s enormous, it works, and it leaves you wrung out in your chair. That’s the movie operating at a very high level. Then, before you’ve come down, you get another piece of story: new information, new stakes, new problem. Then it climbs to another crest, and then it hands you more. Crest, information, crest, information, and you never once get a moment to live with any of it. The floor never comes back up to meet you.
That’s escalation with no release, and escalation with no release is a rhythm problem, not a length problem. Those two get treated as the same note, and they’re not.
By itself, that pattern’s not a flaw. That’s efficient construction, and most movies run it all day long, because most movies don’t have peaks high enough for it to cost you anything. This one does. These set pieces are enormous, so you’re spending real energy on every climb and getting none of it back. By the fourth or fifth cycle, you’re not bored. You’re depleted. And a depleted person has exactly one sentence available to describe the condition, and that sentence is “man, this was long.”
Which is the trick this movie has played on the entire conversation about it. The bored guy and the depleted guy say the identical six words. The bored guy checks his watch because nothing’s happening. The depleted guy checks his watch because too much is happening and he can’t process it fast enough to stay with it. Same complaint, opposite diagnosis. And every explanation I’ve seen for the length of this movie picked the bored guy, and it’s very plainly the other one.
You want the tell? This is the lowest critic score of the four Tom Holland movies and the highest audience score of all nine live-action Spider-Man movies, and both camps walked out saying the same thing about the runtime. When two rooms that agree on nothing land on the same six words, those six words are measuring something neither room has actually named.
Sad on Purpose Is Not Dull
I should tell you where I actually land, because it’s going to sound strange right after all that. This is my favorite Spider-Man movie ever made. No Way Home used to be, mostly for the scope of what it pulled off. Before that, Spider-Man 2. This one is above both, and it isn’t close, because it is the most Spider-Man-y Spider-Man movie that has ever Spider-Man’d.
So I’m the guy who made the length complaint first, unprompted, in the dark, before anybody handed it to me, and I’m the guy telling you it’s the best one. Those don’t fight each other, and by the time we’re done, you’ll see they’re the same sentence.
Which is my problem with the word that keeps getting stuck to this thing: dull. Dull, and downbeat, and self-serious. Sad on purpose is not the same thing as dull. Those are very different words, and this movie is sad on purpose from the top down. Michael Giacchino stood up at Comic-Con and said out loud, “I want to make a sad Spider-Man movie.” Cretton has said in every interview he’s given that the whole question was: who is Peter Parker without Ned, without MJ, without Aunt May, without Tony Stark? That is the assignment. Watching the sad Spider-Man movie and coming back to report that it was sad, that’s not analysis. That’s a plot summary with a frown on it.
Here’s the part that’s a little embarrassing for me, but it’s the strongest thing I’ve got, so you’re getting it. I walked out of that theater with this at a tentative 8. Overnight, it went to a 9. Sitting with it right now, it’s moving higher than that, and I’ve not watched it a second time. One guy’s reaction, sure, but look at what that tells you. If I’m right about the depletion in the room, you’re paying for this movie physically the whole way through, and that cost is sitting on top of every single thing you feel about it. Then you sleep, and the cost clears, and what’s left behind is the construction. And the construction is excellent.
Which is why I don’t think anybody who watched this at a press screening and filed that same night was lying to you about what they felt. They wrote it down before the movie had finished happening to them. Before it had crystallized.
Four False Resolutions
The third act, because that’s where my whole read could come apart, so let me pick the fight myself instead of waiting for somebody else to do it.
The smartest thing I’ve heard said against this movie goes like this: the last stretch hands the film to a brand-new character. It stops being about Peter Parker and turns into a backdoor pilot for whatever’s coming next. I want to be fair to that one, because it’s the only version of this complaint that isn’t about mood. It’s about the architecture. It’s the closest anybody has gotten, and it has the shape exactly right and the cause exactly backwards.
Watch what the back half actually does. It keeps handing you a villain and then revoking it. Sadie Sink’s character is the threat: she’s jumping through bodies, she’s hitting Damage Control, she’s the problem. Then Peter and Frank get the inhibitor onto the back of her neck, Metzger tranquilizes her, and she goes down saying her sister’s name. It has the exact shape of a third-act resolution. The score does the thing. Your body says, “all right, we’re done.” And then MJ mentions, almost offhand, that she doesn’t remember being possessed at all, and the floor drops out, because that means Bill Metzger’s been lying to Peter’s face for the entire picture. So now the antagonist is Damage Control. And then Jean pushes past her own ceiling inside the cell and freezes a mile and a half of Manhattan solid, so now it’s her again for a completely different reason. And then Frank takes his shot, Peter takes the bullet, and it reads as an ending one more time.
That is four false resolutions, and every one of them charges you right back up. The same escalation with no release, except now it’s the story running it instead of the stunt department. The last act didn’t get hijacked by something else. The last act is the movie’s own rhythm showing up in a different department, and it’s the more honest version, because at least in the action you can see the peaks coming.
And here’s where I get off the bus with everybody, because there’s one take going around today and I don’t think it’s right at all. The take is: “Gotcha. Sadie Sink isn’t the villain, Metzger’s the real villain.” And sure, except I don’t think that’s what happened either. Jean Grey was the antagonist. She was the antagonist because she was running counter to the protagonist. That’s what the word means, and it’s the only thing it means, and it does not make her the villain, which is exactly why the back half spends its time showing you what was driving her. And Damage Control isn’t really the villain either. Damage Control’s a government agency doing what government agencies do, which is overreach and overreach and overreach until one day somebody makes them sit in front of a committee and answer for it.
The movie refuses to hand anybody the villain chair. That’s not a twist they fumbled. That’s deliberate, and I think it’s the most grown-up decision in the picture. And something is still missing off the table here. I don’t know if it’s an Oscorp connection, I don’t know what it is, but whatever Damage Control is being built into is bigger than what the movie showed us.
The Quiet Part
So let me say the quiet part. You have a federal agency with a supermax, a black budget, and an active research program dedicated to building hardware that switches off superhuman ability. That infrastructure has exactly one destination, boys and girls: Sentinels. I’m not telling you that’s confirmed, and nobody has confirmed anything. I’m telling you that’s what the infrastructure is for, and this movie put every piece of it on screen and expected you to be looking at the girl.
I can tell you exactly where I first got nervous, because it wasn’t the Jean Grey reveal. It was way earlier, and it was a conversation. Peter goes to see Bruce Banner at the college, and he won’t give Bruce his real name, so he introduces himself as Ned, which is very funny and also pretty sad. They start talking about building an inhibitor, and I’m fine with it, because Peter’s building it for himself. He’s trying to hold his own DNA down. And then the conversation slides just slightly out of this one application for this one person and into something generalized, something that would work on anybody. And I turned and looked at my wife with big, worried eyes, because that is restriction collar territory. That’s the front end of power suppression as public policy.
I had that reaction on instinct, in a theater, with no notes in front of me, and I was pretty pleased with myself. Then I went and checked, and it turns out I was years late. In She-Hulk, Damage Control is already running a supermax that holds superhuman prisoners using technology built specifically to null their abilities. That has been on screen since 2022. In Ms. Marvel, Damage Control is in armed standoffs, in public, with a teenage girl with powers. So Peter Parker’s not planting a seed in that scene. Peter Parker is handing a design upgrade to a program that’s been running for half a decade, and he has no idea. And then this movie makes him stand there and watch what that program does to a teenage girl.
That’s a payoff that’s been sitting in plain sight since 2022, and I walked straight past it into the room. Which is also why I don’t buy that this movie is Marvel doing homework. Damage Control was born in a Spider-Man movie. They’re the reason Adrian Toomes becomes the Vulture in Homecoming, because they take his salvage contract out from under him. They came back in No Way Home and arrested Peter’s entire family, and every time they’ve returned since, they’ve gotten worse. That’s not a foreign object welded into a Spider-Man picture. That’s the one franchise where this organization has always actually mattered, coming home to collect.
And I have to give you the thing I haven’t seen one person say out loud, and I was listening for it the entire runtime, so I’m fairly confident: the movie never says the word mutant. Not one time. It says telepath. It even says enhanced, once. It walks past a hundred opportunities. Everybody writing about this film is using that word, and that is their word. It is not the movie’s word. Which tells you the term hasn’t been coined yet where we’re standing, which tells you exactly where we sit on the timeline, which makes the last shot of Jean Grey mean something specific. She gets on a bus. The bus is headed upstate. That’s me guessing, and I want to be clear about it, but you go ahead and ask yourself: what’s upstate?
The Craft
Now let’s talk craft, because this is a beautifully made movie and I have exactly one real complaint about it, and it’s not the one going around.
Jon Watts directed the first three of these, and before this one went into production, he sat down for an interview and said whoever comes next shouldn’t bother shooting the web swinging practically. His words: it’s boring, it looks dumb, it looks like a monkey swinging on a vine when you put someone on a rope, so don’t waste your time. That was his advice to the next Spider-Man director.
Cretton went and did it anyway. There’s a stunt in the very first act that took a full day to rig, a practical firebomb taking out the ground floor of a building, cars rolling, one take, no second chance at it, and that approach is all over this movie. Here’s the thing about shooting practically: when it works, you’re not thinking about how it got made. You’re just in it. That’s the entire reason to spend the money and take the insurance risk, and the marketing spent four months instructing you to think about it instead. That’s a publicity failure. The filmmaking is not the failure.
Which brings me to something that makes me a little crazy. I keep seeing people say the CG in this is bad. It is not bad. These images are beautiful. The grade is doing real work, the comps hold, and if you think that’s bad CGI, I don’t think you know what CGI is supposed to look like. That’s armchair quarterbacking with a technical word borrowed to sound like you know something.
So let me actually give you one, because there is one. There’s one slow-motion shot in this movie where Spider-Man is sitting in the plate, and I want to be careful here, because the render is fine, the asset is fine, the roto is clean. It’s the lighting. The key on him is not agreeing with the key in the environment he’s supposed to occupy. There’s no interactive light coming off the surfaces around him, and your eye catches that mismatch a beat before your brain can name it, so for one second he reads as a sticker instead of an object with mass in that space. That’s a lighting integration failure. It’s not bad rendering. Those two are not interchangeable, no matter how often you see the words swapped. And I do a version of that job every week of my life when I build a thumbnail: color harmonizing the elements so they read as one image instead of three things stacked on top of each other. Same discipline, about one ten-thousandth of the budget. That’s the difference between watching movies and making things.
The comic book covers. All the way through this thing, the movie drops into slow motion and recomposes the frame into a cover. Boomerang is Amazing Spider-Man #345, the Erik Larsen cover, my favorite artist. Ramrod is #221. Tarantula is #134. And it runs all the way back to Amazing Fantasy #15, which is where the guy started in 1962. Cretton’s account of how that happened is actually pretty great: it started as an idea he thought would be fun to do once or twice, and then they put close to 100 covers up on the walls, and the game became imagining what happened ten seconds before or ten seconds after each image. And I love them. The fan in me loves every single one. And as a filmmaker, after about the fourth or fifth, I didn’t need any more of them. Which is this entire movie in one bit, isn’t it? A great instinct designed for two uses, shipped at 100 covers, and nobody in the room ever calling the diminishing return. Same escalation with no release, running in the montage department.
Frank Castle, Co-Lead
Let me correct how this movie got sold to you. The Hulk, he’s the cameo. Frank Castle, he’s the co-lead. I didn’t expect that going in, and I’d argue Bernthal is playing a full supporting role here, and the chemistry between those two is ridiculous. My first instinct was that Frank sees Peter as the son he never got to raise, and I’ve backed off that. There’s some of it in there, but the longer I sit with it, the more it plays as older brother, younger brother. And Cretton said something that lines up with it exactly: he said Jon’s character is a direct reflection of Peter, and that he’s showing Peter what could happen if he goes down a certain road. A reflection and a warning is a brother. That’s not what a father is.
While I’m on the Hulk, one note, because it’s a design choice and not really a story one. Jean uses Professor Hulk as a blunt instrument, and then she leaves, and whatever she broke on the way out lets the savage version come back, and he reads bigger and more aggressive than he has in a long time. That’s in the silhouette and the animation, not just the writing. I liked that version a great deal. Somebody please fix the rights situation. Give me a Hulk movie. Give me a Planet Hulk. There are feature-scale stories sitting on a shelf over a paperwork problem, and we’re all poorer for it.
And Frank is part of, I think, the smartest structure call in this movie, which is that we open in medias res. We don’t pick up where No Way Home left off. Four years are gone. He’s already fought Frank Castle before we got there. He’s fought Scorpion before, more than once apparently. He’s got a routine. He’s built himself an AI assistant and a printer. He’s a small-scale Tony Stark now, and none of that gets explained to you. It’s simply true when you arrive.
His rogues gallery is used the way a rogues gallery ought to be used, which is as texture. Boomerang, Tarantula, Ramrod, Tombstone, all in a montage, all of them telling you what four years of this looked like, and not one of them driving plot. I think that’s the fix for the thing Spider-Man movies have always gotten wrong, which is stacking six antagonists across the front and demanding they all carry weight. This one lets them be the job, and I love that. Ramrod’s in there because Ramrod is the only villain in this entire picture who actually appears in the 2008 Brand New Day run.
While we’re here: the Hand is a feint. The campaign sold you a Hand movie, and they’re set dressing. There’s no Daredevil touchback at all. Frank never so much as references them, and I’d have taken one throwaway line from Ned about a curfew to tie it off. Although I suspect Marvel’s deliberately backing off how tightly the television connects into the films, and honestly, that’s probably the safer bet.
The Title Is Being Sneaky
Which is a good place to get into the comics, because this title’s being sneaky. Brand New Day, the comic, is 2008. It’s the relaunch immediately after One More Day, where Peter’s marriage is traded away and the world forgets he’s Spider-Man. The entire mandate of that relaunch was back to basics: broke, single, street level, new supporting cast. That’s the branding on this movie, and it fits the setup perfectly.
But the story this movie’s actually adapting is not Brand New Day. It’s The Other. That’s 2005. That’s the one where Peter’s body starts changing on him, where he cocoons, where he comes out with organic webbing and a far more primal instinct set, where the spider side starts winning. Sadie Sink’s character says it out loud in this movie: the spider is swallowing the man. That’s that arc’s entire thesis statement on the page. And in the comics, Peter goes to Bruce Banner about it, because Banner is who you go to about radiation, which is precisely what happens here.
And here’s the joke, and I don’t think anybody’s told it yet: organic webbing is one of the things the real Brand New Day relaunch took away from him. So the movie named after the storyline that removed organic webbing is the movie that hands him organic webbing.
Jean has a sister in this movie, Sarah Gray, and Damage Control took her and experimented on her and killed her trying to replicate what she could do. That is the engine of Jean’s entire rampage. So I went and checked, because I couldn’t remember whether Jean’s sister was a telepath on the page. She’s real. Sarah Gray, first mentioned in 1966, first actually drawn during the Dark Phoenix Saga. And in the comics she’s not a telepath at all. She’s a regular human. She marries, has two kids, learns her sister’s a mutant, becomes an advocate for mutant rights, and then she’s murdered by anti-mutant extremists and absorbed by the Phalanx. Except Chris Claremont’s original plan after Dark Phoenix was to leave Jean dead, reveal that Sarah had latent powers, and put her on the team in Jean’s place. He never got to run it. Marvel finally brought her back and revealed that dormant ability in a book last year. So this movie is executing an abandoned Claremont plan about 40 years late, which is the kind of thing that makes me want to lie down.
Look at what they changed about how she dies, because that’s the part that matters. On the page, Sarah Gray is killed by bigots. In this movie, Sarah Gray is killed by a government agency running experiments to replicate her powers. They moved the threat off of hate and onto the state. Which is the same idea I was telling you about with that inhibitor conversation, arriving from a completely different direction, through a completely different department, by a completely different route. When one idea shows up three times through three doors, that’s not coincidence. Somebody in that room decided it.
The Letter
Okay, the heart of it. Peter takes MJ to Frank’s place to keep her safe, and she finds the letter. This is the letter he wrote her at the end of No Way Home and never delivered. And earlier in the film, Jean already weaponized that letter against him, and it really sucks. She possesses MJ, she gets inside Peter’s head, she finds it in there, and she stages true love’s first kiss right in front of him, and then mocks him with it. That’s a horrible thing to do to a person, and the movie knows it’s horrible. So by the time MJ is sitting there with the real letter in her hands, we’ve already been given this exact ending once and had it taken back. The same false resolution beat, run one more time, in the only department the movie hadn’t tried it in yet.
And then she reads it, and she tells him she doesn’t remember him. There’s nothing in there. The spell simply worked. And then she takes him upstairs anyway, and they hang out with Ned, and he’s in the suit the entire time, mask on, sitting in an apartment with two people who have no idea who he is. And it felt so good. That’s the movie.
That’s not an accident either, because there’s a costume motif running underneath this whole picture. Every time you get Peter in the mask without the suit, or the suit without the mask, the frame is telling you which half of him is currently driving. Watch for it on a rewatch. It’s disciplined.
Then the ending. Peter’s buying flowers for Aunt May’s grave. Ned walks in. Peter introduces himself as Peter, and their old handshake just happens, both of them, automatically, and Ned looks up and goes, “Peter?”
There’s a read going around on this, and I want to give it to you straight, because it’s a good one and it’s got real evidence under it. The argument is that MJ is already remembering and hiding it. She’s on that roof at the end holding a necklace Peter gave her, a necklace she has no reason to be holding. And earlier, when the Hulk has him completely beaten and Peter says, “It’s me, Peter,” the Hulk hesitates. Those are two real pieces of evidence, and if you buy them, Ned is the second domino and the spell is coming apart.
I’m not there, and I know that puts me in the minority. What I think happened is Ned’s body ran that handshake on pure muscle memory, and then his mouth connected the name he’d just been handed to the guy standing in front of him, and what crosses his face is him landing on “oh, you’re Spider-Man.” That’s association. That’s not restored memory. Now, could the magic be a factor, since he handled the sling ring in the last movie? And yeah, I know that was contrived. Sure, it’s on the table. But I think the simple version is the correct one, and I’d rather tell you what I actually believe and be wrong out loud than take the popular reading because it’s tidier.
The Verdict
Let me put all of it on the scale. Against it, I’ve got a movie that never lets you live with anything, that stacks its peaks until you’re depleted and calling that length. A cover gag that outstays itself by a good half dozen appearances. A first-person gimmick that shows up and leaves. One composite where the lighting doesn’t marry. A sniper shot that doesn’t survive being looked at directly. All of that is real.
And for it, I’ve got the most Spider-Man that Spider-Man has ever been on screen. A picture that opens in medias res and trusts you to keep up with it. Frank Castle and Peter Parker in a two-hander I never saw coming. Practical stunt work that a previous director of this exact franchise publicly advised against attempting. And a movie that walked out of that theater at an 8 in my head and has climbed pretty much every hour since, without me ever having watched it again.
That’s a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. That is my favorite Spider-Man movie ever made. I know that lands strange after everything I just told you about the length, but I’d rather be honest than tidy.
Cretton said this whole film grows out of Peter misunderstanding what Aunt May told him, and learning across the movie what she actually meant. And then the movie takes the lesson, puts May inside a memory, and hands it to a second lonely kid who has also decided she has to do this by herself. With great power comes great responsibility, taught again, on screen, to the next generation of this franchise. That’s the thing they called dumb.
One more thing. My wife, sitting right next to me when that tracker pinged past the moon, said out loud, “Wait, why is Spider-Man in space?” That is the right question. It’s the only question that matters walking out of that theater, and I think the answer is Secret Wars. And that’s a guess nobody has confirmed at all.
Your turn. Drop your Know-It-All Index for Brand New Day in the comments on the video above, and give me a real answer on this one: does Ned actually remember, or did his hand just run the handshake before his brain caught up? I’ve talked myself into both answers twice.
