Is this a safe space? I hope it is because, as a longtime former MCU fan, I have to sit down and admit that, deep down, I never really thought Tom Holland had that Spidey it quality. Wait. Put the pitchforks down. Let me rephrase that. I always thought the writers were doing a pretty bad job with Spider-Man in the MCU. There. It was never really about Tom (maybe a little).
But in all fairness, my teenage self got deeply invested in Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man. Not just because of all the teenage-girl feelings he stirred in me, but because, out of all of them, I always felt like he was the only one who actually got it. In fact, I’m going to talk about the latest Spider-Man installment, Brand New Day, and praise the hell out of it, but I’ll also say that I think they’re still trying to capture that quick-witted, fast-talking version of Spider-Man, and it still doesn’t quite work. I think Andrew was the only one who ever truly nailed it.
But we’ve moved past the other Spider-Men. This is Tom Holland’s era, and he absolutely deserves it.
So, shall we dig into the roots of what makes everyone’s favorite friendly neighbor so beloved? At least from my point of view.
There’s something about Spider-Man that, even as we find ourselves in the middle of superhero fatigue and an oversaturated genre, still manages to fill theaters. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has even managed to surpass what I would consider the MCU’s most ambitious, and perhaps most self-important entry in its long-running saga, the culmination of everything that came before it, Avengers: Endgame.
We always find ourselves rooting for the hero who comes from the bottom. The kid.
Spider-Man first appeared in Marvel comics in 1962. Part of what made him so distinctive among young readers at the time was that, unlike teenage characters such as Robin in Batman, Peter wasn’t relegated to being the sidekick of an adult hero. He was a full-fledged hero in his own right, even if he still lived with his aunt and uncle, even if he was socially awkward and not particularly popular. He was the perfect vessel for any kid who felt a little uncomfortable in their own skin to pour a little bit of themselves into and see themselves reflected back.
And this is where I start getting into some of the mistakes MCU’s different writers made when it came to characterizing him. Spider-Man doesn’t even enter this cinematic universe with a movie of his own, but as a supporting character of an adult hero in a war that was already brewing: Civil War.
The superhero whose story had once foregrounded the struggles of adolescence, the financial worries of a working-class life, and the moral responsibility that came with his powers ends up becoming the… apprentice? Because it’s not like Peter was ever actually Tony Stark’s apprentice, but we could say that, when it comes to the whole superhero business, Stark is the one who takes him under his wing and brings him to the next level (dust.)
Peter Parker isn’t driven to do good on some massive scale, stopping alien invasions or preventing apocalypses. What really fuels people’s love for Spider-Man is how grounded he feels. He deals with the problems that affect ordinary people in their everyday lives because these are his neighbors, because Peter is one of them. And he doesn’t have to do any of it, but the responsibility that comes with great power, his guilt over his uncle's death and not doing more about it, and his own principles push him to act, turning him into one of our favorite vigilantes.
Holland’s first three movies in the MCU lost some of that sense of the city, that great character in Spider-Man’s life, and decided to revolve around something bigger instead. In them, Peter is deeply influenced by Tony, whom he clearly looks up to, while his own world shrinks down to his school, his classmates, and a handful of recurring characters (Ned, MJ, Flash), often used for laughs. I’d even argue that these characters don’t do much beyond fulfilling a function within Peter’s life as a student, yet we know surprisingly little about them. In this universe, Peter has his Aunt May and still we know very little about the life they share. There's no weight over losing his parents or his uncle Ben. He goes to a good school, has a promising future ahead of him, has access to Tony Stark and resources no other movie version of Peter Parker could have ever dreamed of, and money rarely seems to be much of an issue.
A movie’s personality lives in the details, too. It feels strange to watch Spider-Man without seeing him swinging between New York buildings, getting his picture taken, living in Queens with all the problems that come with being young. Some of those things get lost when you try to fit the web-slinger into a universe already built around other heroes and, more importantly, other problems. The political conflict between Iron Man and Captain America. Thanos invading. Half of all life in the universe being wiped out. The friendly neighborhood hero starts to feel pretty small and almost unnecessary with so much happening around him. Unlike other Spider-Man movies, these films struggle with that competition of scale when it comes to building their own conflicts and villains.
Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home (how did we let them get away with those names?) have their ups and downs. I think going to see a Marvel movie (when you’re caught up with everything that’s going on) is an experience in and of itself. Personally, I always had a lot of fun with them, but you could gradually see the quality slipping and, at a certain point, the whole thing started to feel exhausting. Far From Home had its moments, but I’d probably consider it the worst of the three, while one of the biggest reasons No Way Home became so ingrained in our collective memory was the reactions we all had in the theater when we got to see all those actors again. (Andrew Garfield, you liar!)
Will the real Spidey Please Stand Up
Brand New Day is, and feels, different from the very beginning. Watching it, you think: This is Spider-Man. Which is a little ironic because Peter himself is going through an existential crisis throughout the movie, unable to balance his double life because, what’s the point of being Peter Parker if he’s lost everything that anchored him to that identity?
The movie deals with the consequences of the previous installments, but somehow manages to feel completely new. It brings Peter Parker back down to earth, strips away the weight of the Avengers, and reintroduces him to New York as just another citizen, even though we know he can never really be only that. Bringing Peter back to Queens, back to the streets, public transportation, the buildings, feels like bringing him home. You could almost say this is the real homecoming.
I keep coming back to the city because I don’t think it works as just a backdrop for this particular character, in the same way I’d say Matt Murdock and Hell’s Kitchen are inseparable.
The city determines the scale at which the character works. Peter lives among the same people he later has to save, far removed from Stark mansions or the kind of distance other heroes can have from ordinary life.
Spider-Man doesn’t only show up when the planet is about to explode. He’s there when something happens on your block. He stops villains, but he also gets your stolen bike back, gives directions, helps people cross the street, and stops neighborhood robberies that could easily be happening two blocks away from his own apartment.
This is one of the things the MCU’s ever-growing scale made harder to preserve for the character. Once Peter enters a universe concerned with superhero wars, alien invasions, space travel, and threats capable of wiping out half the universe, a competition of scale inevitably appears. How do you make the thief on the corner matter when, two movies ago, we watched half the population disappear? How do we make saving just one person feel like it's enough again?
Spider-Man specifically needs one person to be enough. Even the way he moves through New York reinforces that closeness. Superman could look down at a city from the sky. Batman can watch Gotham from the top of a building. Tony built the Avenger's tower. Spider-Man moves between the buildings. He passes windows and balconies, drops until he’s almost touching the street before swinging back up, crosses paths with taxis, signs, vendors, and pedestrians. His powers lift him above everyone else, but he’s constantly coming back down, constantly making contact.
Peter is one of those characters who thrives on the tension of a double identity. Spider-Man can have this heroic, vigilante relationship with New York while Peter Parker lives a pretty ordinary life within it.
That’s why bringing him back to New York in Brand New Day (I know he never left but... you know what I mean) means more than simply returning him to familiar comic territory. Peter has lost the people who once anchored his civilian identity. No one remembers who he is. Tony is no longer there to open the doors to a bigger world, nor are the Avengers as he knew them. He doesn’t have Ned. He lost his relationship with MJ. But he still has the city.
But this new life also comes with a warning. The movie introduces the Punisher to the MCU... Not that he hasn’t already been walking around with all that baggage on our streaming services. For those of us who watched The Punisher (and I will always, completely recommend that if you’re into Marvel, you check out both Daredevil and The Punisher, from the Netflix era all the way into Disney+), this introduction doesn’t feel random.
They could have followed up on the last movie and reintroduced us to Matt Murdock, who I think would work incredibly well with this new version of Holland’s Spider-Man, and I really hope we get to see that in the next movie (there’s gonna be a next one, right?...). But choosing Frank Castle instead sends a very clear message to Peter. This is what happens when you’re left alone for too long, when you don’t heal and try to suppress everything. This is what happens when you let that side of yourself win.
Jon and Tom have great chemistry, so their scenes together, and especially their banter, were a perfect addition to this new, adult version of Peter Parker. Between Grumpy Castle, the citizens of New York, Yelena’s quirkiness, and Detective DeWolff bringing out the more human side of the job, Peter’s new life away from the old friends who have forgotten him brings us closer to the juggling act of an early-twenties kid trying to deal with his superhero persona. We’ve seen this in other movies before, but somehow, in this one, it feels more palpable.
As for the things that left me thinking a little too long, Jean Grey (which would later lead to the introduction of this new, younger version of the X-Men, as we’ve seen these past few days) playing the misunderstood villain made me raise an eyebrow. I loved it in this movie, but the choice of character felt a bit strange. I haven’t read enough X-Men comics to say for sure, but I’m sure you’ve seen this type of antagonist before. The scruffy young outcast who is hurting, so they start hurting everyone around them and lashing out, whose pain can almost always be traced back to the death of a family member (pretty similar to how the Maximoffs were introduced in Age of Ultron).
It's not a bad thing that they used Jean. I’m just surprised that this is how they chose to introduce such an important character in the X-Men universe, as a troubled young side antagonist in a Spider-Man movie.
I said in the beginning that Spidey's quirkiness still feels a bit stiff in the MCU. Tobey Maguire was a great Peter Parker, and Andrew Garfield was a great Spider-Man. What about Tom Holland?
Tom has always been good at playing the kid underneath the suit. His Peter was younger, just like the actor himself, and the weight of the character’s age becomes much more noticeable when the person portraying him is actually closer to it. So we see something dangerous happening and think, damn, this kid should be back home doing homework, not almost dying in a red-and-blue spandex suit. Adding Tony was, in a way, a replacement for the kind of relationship Peter would have lost with Uncle Ben, even though they also tried to play Aunt May as the MCU Peter’s version of Uncle Ben.
Brand New Day allows Peter to finally move past that “proving himself” stage and brings us to a different question.
Do we like him better now that he’s miserable and sad?
It kind of sounds horrible when I put it like that lol. But I mean it judging by the internet's collective excitement at seeing Peter Parker being broke and lonely.
Part of the soul of the hero is the struggle, I believe. It's not that people love watching a poor kid have the worst day over and over again and that somehow becoming Spider-Man fixes everything. Peter Parker's pain is what moves him into trying to do better, be better.
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