It's a BRAND NEW DAY as the Road to DOOMSDAY begins

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a potent reminder that superhero fatigue is not the problem with audiences. What they’re actually tired of is being served pure marketing disguised as the final product. What matters most is the movie, and Daniel Destin Cretton deserves to bask in the inevitable massive success of this weekend because he dug deep and came up with the most charming and creatively successful of the seven movies Tom Holland has appeared in so far as Spider-Man. It is heartfelt, it is drunk in love with the source material (and not just the comics), and it feels like a complete and consistent thematic statement.

Having said that, it does not reinvent the wheel. It just delivers a fully satisfying wheel, which is the point of the thing. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe was chugging along at full speed, dominating each year’s box-office charts, building a fan base that seemed to exponentially grow with each new swing they took, the dirty secret to their success was that the films were genuinely enjoyable. Not everything worked, but you could feel how sincerely they were working to build a world of characters who could all play in each other’s sandboxes, telling one story at a time while hinting at a larger world that might connect it all. In Brand New Day, screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers are definitely working to serve a number of different masters, but they make it all feel like something that was designed to work together instead of just a corporate bag o’synergy. Peter Parker, who made the choice at the end of No Way Home to let Doctor Strange cast a spell that made everyone in every timeline forget him completely. He did this to protect the people in his life and to correct a mistake he made, but this film makes it clear that he paid dearly for that decision. Tom Holland has grown into this character, and while I think with some perspective, it’s deeply strange that they made a Surf Dracula trilogy for a character who had already been the center of two other franchises, Holland has grown up in this costume, and at this point, I think it’s fair to argue that he is the definitive onscreen Spider-Man.

It feels like the only way Marvel can pass the torch at this point is to bring Miles Morales into the MCU, with Peter serving as an older mentor figure who could dip in and out of movies as needed. Holland’s going to make at least two or three more films playing the part, and if he makes it to ten, that’s going to be the kind of legendary run that defines a movie star, whatever the rest of their career might be. Some people do it in fewer films, but Holland makes it look easy at this point. In his first film playing the part, he goes head-to-head with pretty much every other Marvel character and steals every one of his scenes. When you’re in a movie with Robert Downey Jr. and Paul Rudd and you’re the one walking away with things, that says something. The character he’s playing now is richer and more lived in, and that’s the advantage that comes from playing something for nine years, and he’s clearly taking more ownership behind the scenes. I’m sure he’s got plenty of stories about creative struggles on every one of the previous films that all added up to the ideas he brought to the table this time. He has completed his first six-film contract, so at this point, anything he does, he does because he still feels like there’s juice in the squeeze. He has spent the last nine years meeting people all over the world who tell him about what Spider-Man means to him, and after a while, that starts to really leave an impression. He knows how important this is to many people, and you can feel that in this movie.

A movie like this is going to push you to think about how far this character has come and how the MCU has changed, just in the time since Holland was introduced. And later this year, it’s going to be inevitable that we look back not only at the films since Endgame, but on everything since the MCU kicked off in 2008. And, believe me, Doomsday is coming, whether we’re ready or not.

I have not spent a lot of time and energy writing about Marvel Studios lately. Admittedly, I haven’t written about a lot of new films for the past few years, but the MCU thing is extra-weird because I spent so much time and energy writing about them for the first decade of their existence.

I still watch pretty much everything, but I’ve been able to simply watch it and then move on, something that was not possible when these first few phases were released. I was writing about everything, covering breaking news, and visiting the sets and the editing rooms of most of these films. I started this coverage at Ain’t It Cool, continued it at HitFix, then carried it over to Pulp & Popcorn, finally publishing my Endgame review as a standalone piece you could buy from the Pulp & Popcorn store. I wanted to create a place here where these pieces could be permanently archived, particularly seeing what's happened to

Watching ComicCon unfold from a distance last week, I felt absolutely zero nostalgia for the experience of attending the event as press. I have specific memories I love and treasure from this era, memories from the sets, from the editing rooms, from screenings and press events and junkets, and I love that my kids got to grow up around all of this, walking into rooms where they got to meet all of their heroes. One of the reasons I decided to write this series was because of the conversation I had with them when the Doomsday trailer dropped last week.

They’re both genuinely excited, optimistic, and eager to see how this film tries to pull together everything that’s happened since Endgame was released. While both of the boys are watching a variety of styles and genres and filmmakers these days, they were weaned on Marvel, and it’s in their bones. They remain curious and dedicated, even if they don’t like individual entries in the larger franchise, and they have their own takes on everything that’s come out, one that doesn’t seem to be influenced by online conversation at all. If anything, they’re annoyed by the Marvel Online Economy, the people who have to wring daily content out of all things Marvel, and who depend on outrage to keep the grift afloat. It has led them to disconnect from what they see as a fair-weather fandom, ready to bash everything the studio puts out.

It was an interesting conversation because I realized how I’ve given in to a sort of reflexive cynicism about Marvel even though I’ve also enjoyed a number of their recent projects. One of the things I’ve really tried to model for the boys is a non-cynical approach to engaging with films. Meet things on their terms. Respect the swing being taken and respect the intent behind things. I’ve known Kevin Feige longer than there’s been a Marvel Cinematic Universe, and at this point, this franchise represents one of the biggest creative endeavors ever produced under one person’s larger guidance. Bigger than any other franchise you can name. It is serialized storytelling on a massive scale, and with a huge pool of creative talent all focused on this larger task. It is one large story built from dozens of smaller interconnected pieces, and it’s interesting to see how that story continues to bend and twist and grow and shrink, and how the sideshow around the MCU has grown into a thing that almost exists separate from the films and shows now. I’d like to talk about all of that as we count down to Doomsday, part one of what feels like the conclusion of an era, and part of what has to be a major reinvention if there’s going to be a Marvel Studios a decade from now.

So let’s go all the way back to where this began, with the first three films they released. I’m going to print my original review, and then I’m going to add some 2026 perspective to them all. And while I’ve said before that I wouldn’t write about this stuff anymore at all, I think I’ve had enough time away that I’m excited to actually count down to a film that feels like a turning point for the studio, no matter what happens. If they knock it out of the park and people enjoy it, they buy themselves a lot of breathing room. If they fumble the bag, that’s going to be impossible to ignore and worth dissecting. Either way, I’m genuinely curious, especially when you consider how small-scale that first film was back in 2008…