Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

The substantial improvement of the third and fourth MCU/Sony Spider-Man films, in comparison to the “meh” first and second films in the series, moves me to posit a symmetry between No Way Home (reviewed here), and Brand New Day. Home is about how the hero responds ethically to villains. Day is about how the hero responds ethically to monsters. I’m sure I could be cooking up this symmetry out of my own preoccupations. Still, all four of these MCU/Sony Spider-Man projects have shared two writers–Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers–so that’s one real-world symmetry. Until the fourth film in the series, Jon Watts directed them all, only to be replaced by Destin Daniel Cretton. But even if none of the previous raconteurs had returned, whoever worked on Day would have been obliged to deal with the dangling plotline from Home: the mind-wiping spell that restored the secrecy of Spider-Man’s secret identity but also caused his two best friends to forget they had ever known Peter Parker. Now, while No Way Home probably owes some debt to the 2007 comic-book story One More Day, the Brand New Day movie bears little resemblance to the 2008 comic of the same name. Day‘s script forces Peter Parker (Tom...