Spider-Man: Brand New Day is exactly what its title promises and not quite as much as you might hope. Tom Holland returns as a physically stacked and maturing Peter Parker whose secret identity has been wiped from the world’s memory by Doctor Strange — leaving him back where he started, beloved as Spider-Man but anonymous as a human being, pining for the people he loves and particularly for MJ, played with instinctive grownup authority by Zendaya. It is Zendaya who saves the film from its own genre familiarity, and that sentence is both the most important thing to know and the most significant problem the movie has to reckon with.
The reset established at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home places Peter in a scuzzy single room surrounded by screens and tech gear, reconnecting with the loneliness of the early films while the world has no memory that he is the man behind the mask — including Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and MJ herself. This is meant to give director Destin Daniel Cretton a clean slate, but the question the film never quite answers is whether a reset is the same thing as a genuinely new direction.
The Threat and the Body Horror
The villain driving the plot is a sinister entity that possesses the bodies of important people around New York City, beginning with the Scorpion (Michael Mando), and working toward infiltrating the government’s Department of Damage Control — run with considerable menace by Tramell Tillman, whose work in Severance on television has already established him as someone worth watching. Coinciding with this external threat, Parker begins experiencing unprecedented headaches and physical symptoms that push the film into what the reviewer calls “the David Cronenberg zone” — a body horror register that is more interesting as a direction than the film ultimately commits to.
To address both crises, Parker consults Black Widow, in an amusing cameo from Florence Pugh that involves both characters in a plunge pool (Pugh reclining, Holland masked and in underpants). He also seeks help from Mark Ruffalo’s ageing Bruce Banner, whose involvement ends in predictable chaos. And he develops a fractious, grudging alliance with Jon Bernthal’s Punisher — a character whose presence here echoes the Odyssey reunion with Holland and Bernthal as a pleasing meta layer for anyone who has seen Nolan’s film.
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Why Zendaya Is the Film’s Real Argument
The most compelling thread throughout is Parker’s obsession with MJ — effectively stalking her civilian life, watching her move on with someone new, seeking any pretext to cross her path. The scenes between Holland and Zendaya are among the most emotionally direct the franchise has delivered, and Zendaya’s grownup naturalism gives them genuine weight. There is a moment of transgressive sexuality that catches the film off guard in the best possible way. “Her naturally relaxed style and self-possession give the proceedings a boost” in a way that the CGI destruction sequences simply cannot.
The film closes with the familiar Marvel-scale digital city carnage — spectacular, temporary, and not quite capable of the surprise it aims for. Swinging through Manhattan without the structural logic of where webs would attach remains an unresolved comedy. The film is entertaining enough, but the more formally adventurous work that the animated Spider-Verse films have set as a benchmark makes this live-action version feel like a genre product rather than a genre statement.
A more radical rethink is still waiting somewhere ahead. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is competent, occasionally moving, and elevated significantly by Zendaya. Whether that is enough depends on how much you still enjoy the shape of this particular story.
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Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens in theatres nationwide July 31.
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