Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review Verdict: Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the Tom Holland Spider-Man film I have been waiting for since Homecoming. More personality, more emotion, more genuine Spider-Man DNA than anything that came before it. It is not a perfect film; the editing shows its scars, certain villains deserved more screen time, and my feelings on Sadie Sink as Jean Grey are genuinely complicated, but for the first time across four films, I left the theater thinking Tom Holland is not just a good MCU character. He is a great Spider-Man.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters worldwide. This is a full spoiler review. If you have not seen the film, bookmark this page and come back. You will want to experience the V-Max reveal, the MJ scene, and the post-credits cold without knowing what is coming.
Quick Verdict: Is Spider-Man Brand New Day Worth Watching?
Without question. This is the best Tom Holland Spider-Man film, and I say that as someone who genuinely enjoyed Homecoming and thought No Way Home was emotionally earned, even if it was leaning heavily on other people’s villains to get there. Brand New Day does something different. It commits to Peter Parker. Not Tony Stark’s protégé, not the kid who needed saving, not a vessel for nostalgic cameos.
Just Peter. Alone in his city, in his attic, visiting Aunt May’s grave with flowers he can barely afford, being the best thing that ever happened to New York, while being completely invisible as a human being.
That contrast, the idolized hero, the invisible person, has always been the heart of Spider-Man as a character. This film finally builds its entire architecture around it. And it works.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day — Movie Info
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | Spider-Man: Brand New Day |
| Director | Destin Daniel Cretton |
| Studio | Marvel Studios / Sony Pictures |
| Lead | Tom Holland as Peter Parker / Spider-Man |
| Supporting Cast | Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Mark Ruffalo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Talia Tilman |
| Genre | Superhero / Action / Drama |
| Set After | Spider-Man: No Way Home (four years later) |
| Our Rating | ★★★★☆ (4/5) |
Spider-Man: Brand New Day — Full Cast
| Actor | Character |
|---|---|
| Tom Holland | Peter Parker / Spider-Man |
| Sadie Sink | Jean Grey / “The Villain” |
| Jon Bernthal | Frank Castle / The Punisher |
| Zendaya | MJ |
| Jacob Batalon | Ned Leeds |
| Mark Ruffalo | Bruce Banner / Professor Hulk / Savage Hulk |
| Julia Louis-Dreyfus | Valentina Allegra de Fontaine / Yelena |
| Talia Tilman | William Mezure |
| Lisa Collins | Gan D. Wolf |
| Matt Lintz | Supporting |
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Producers: Amy Pascal, Kevin Feige
The Opening Montage: Four Years in Four Minutes
The film opens with a montage of the four years between No Way Home and now, Peter building his life as a solo Spider-Man, working alongside the NYPD, earning the city’s complete trust and love. I liked the concept immediately. Seeing Spider-Man go from the kid who was barely keeping it together in Homecoming to the person the whole city calls their hero, that arc needed to be shown, not just assumed.
But I am going to be honest about something: that montage felt clunky. There were moments in it where I could feel scenes that had been cut. The Tombstone sequence, in particular, we have known for months from promo material that Tombstone had a role in this film, and what makes it to the screen is a handful of shots.
The same goes for Tarantula and Boomerang, two Spider-Man villains I was genuinely excited to see finally realised on screen, who get maybe two seconds of screen time each. The merchandise had prepared me for more. The film did not deliver it.
The reason, I suspect, is no mystery. Tom Holland has spoken about the editing process, how he hated the first cut, how test audience feedback led to significant restructuring, how scenes were removed, and how sequences were shortened. I could feel that in the montage more than anywhere else. It does not ruin what follows. But it is the film’s first and most obvious evidence of the messier production history underneath.
What the montage does well, and this matters, is establishing who Peter Parker is right now. He is comfortable in the suit in a way he has never been before. He is giving commands to police officers.
He is saving people with an efficiency and grace that feels earned rather than performed. And behind the mask, he is buying weekly flowers for Aunt May’s grave and living alone in a dusty attic in his old building because he asked to be moved somewhere nobody would bother him. The contrast is the whole film. The montage sets it perfectly.
Is Spider-Man: Brand New Day Tom Holland’s Best Performance?
Yes. And it is not particularly close.
Tom Holland has always been a good actor. What he has not always had is a film that asked him to carry something genuinely heavy without giving him a mentor to lean on or a crossover event to share the weight with. Brand New Day takes every safety net away. No Tony Stark. No Nick Fury. No Stephen Strange.
Just Peter, in a ratty attic, fixing broken equipment he dumpster-dived to acquire, being the city’s beloved hero by day and completely unknown as a human being by night.
The rain sequence, the one from the trailers, where Peter free-falls between rooftops after seeing MJ with her new boyfriend, hit me harder in the theater than I expected.
What the film is doing in that moment is showing you something the franchise has danced around for years: Peter at his lowest, his arachnid instincts starting to subsume the human part of him, genuinely asking himself what would happen if he just did not throw the web this time. That is dark material. Holland plays it without a single line of dialogue and gets it completely right.
He also sounds different in this film. Thicker New York accent, more naturalistic behind the mask. He has grown into the role in a way that makes the earlier films feel like early drafts of something that just became final.
The Frank Castle / Punisher Dynamic: Best Relationship in the MCU Right Now
I went into this film thinking Punisher would be a glorified cameo. I came out thinking his scenes with Spider-Man are the most interesting superhero relationship Marvel has put on screen in years.
Jon Bernthal plays Frank Castle the way he has always played him, no compromises made for the tonal register of a Spider-Man movie. Punisher is still Punisher. When MJ touches one of his family photos on his boat, and he immediately gets protective and cold, that is Frank. When he tells Spider-Man flatly that he is going to handle the situation his way, meaning someone is going to die, that is Frank. The film does not soften him to fit the property he has been placed in. It drops him in and lets the friction with Peter generate the drama.
The scene where Frank tells Peter that he is not like him, that he has people, that having people is a choice, that the loneliness Peter feels is not the same as Frank’s actual isolation, is one of the film’s best-written scenes. It is the kind of dialogue exchange that would not have existed in the John Watts films, and its presence here tells you exactly what kind of filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton is and what he was trying to do differently.
The Punisher recreating his iconic first-appearance comic cover by sniping Spider-Man had the theater audibly reacting. And then the window scene at the end, Frank watching the city celebrate Spider-Man, completely alone, almost allowing himself to be somebody’s friend, I did not expect to find that quietly moving. I did.
Sadie Sink as Jean Grey: The Complicated One
Here is where I have to be genuinely honest, because my feelings are not simple.
The film earned the Jean Grey reveal for me thematically. Peter is alone and misunderstood. She is alone and misunderstood. The Aunt May speech that gets replayed through Jean’s perspective at the end, the one about how when you help someone, you help everyone, works precisely because it is not written for Jean specifically. It is the speech Peter has always carried, and seeing it reach someone else through the involuntary intimacy of telepathy is genuinely affecting. Thematically, Destin Daniel Cretton made this work.
My issue is structural, and it has been building across four Tom Holland films. Vulture was a villain motivated by Tony Stark. Mysterio was motivated by Tony Stark. The No Way Home villains belonged to other Spider-Men. And now Jean Grey, a character whose primary identity is X-Men, whose arc in the MCU clearly has years left to run, becomes Spider-Man’s antagonist for a film that also has Scorpion, Tombstone, Tarantula, Boomerang, and Ramrod sitting in the background with barely enough screen time to register.
This is Tom Holland’s fourth Spider-Man film. He still does not have a villain who is his. Who exists in the MCU specifically to be his enemy. Who has no other purpose in the broader universe than to make Peter Parker’s life specifically difficult. Scorpion has been teased since Homecoming. After Brand New Day, he is no closer to being that villain. That is a real ongoing frustration, and I want to name it even while acknowledging that this film made the best possible case for the creative choice it made.
Sadie Sink is, for the record, very good in the role. The MJ scene, where Peter thinks he is finally getting through to the real MJ and she is remembering who he is, and then the reveal that Jean has been inside MJ’s mind the whole time, performing the reconciliation as a taunt, is a masterclass in misdirection. I bought it completely. When Jean said, “Go ahead, Peter. Hold her. I know you’ve been wanting to,” I got chills. That scene alone almost resolves all my reservations. Almost.
The V-Max Reveal: Best MCU Mystery Payoff in Years
I need to talk about this because it is the moment that made me fully commit to loving this film.
The entire second and third act is built around a MacGuffin called V-Max. Something Jean Grey desperately needs. Something Damage Control has. Something everyone assumes is a weapon, a formula, possibly a symbiote. The word symbiote is never said, but I would be lying if I told you it was not in the back of my mind for the entire film.
And then the reveal. Damage Control has been running experiments on Jean’s sister, Sarah, trying to replicate her telepathic ability, eventually killing her in the process. And the last thing Sarah ever saw, trapped in an experimentation room, was a ventilation shaft above her. Labeled V-Max. That was it. Not a weapon. Not a drug. Not a symbiote. The designation on a vent shaft that a dying girl stared at until she was gone. And Jean, in Sarah’s mind at the moment of death, carried that image and that word and spent years trying to understand what it meant, thinking it was something that could help her or save her.
It meant nothing. And it meant everything.
I genuinely did not see it coming. The theater went quiet in a way that told me no one else did either. That is good cinema. Destin Daniel Cretton earned every moment of goodwill that was revealed.
The Hulk: More Than Marketing
When Hulk was announced for this film, my first instinct was that it was a marketing move. Get two Avengers in the same frame, sell tickets, worry about the narrative justification later. I was half right.
The narrative justification, Peter building an inhibitor chip to suppress his Man-Spider transformation, using the same technology Bruce Banner uses to manage his Hulk tendencies, is actually earned within the film’s logic. And the implication that this inhibitor technology will eventually become the power-suppressing collars used on mutants in future X-Men films is a genuinely interesting piece of connective tissue. Peter Parker as the inadvertent creator of the X-Men’s greatest oppressive weapon, that is the kind of quietly devastating irony that the MCU at its best deploys without announcing itself.
The Savage Hulk fight sequence is outstanding. What begins as Professor Hulk, restrained, measured, his shirt intact, becomes something else once Jean Grey gets inside his mind and the rage surfaces. The fight is dynamic, brutal, and uses the camera in ways that feel genuinely fresh for a Marvel action sequence. Spider-Man does not win. That matters. He survives because the Hulk chooses to stop, and even that ambiguity, does Savage Hulk remember Peter, or does he just not want to kill, is left appropriately unclear.
My only honest criticism is that Hulk’s exit feels abrupt. He falls. And that is it. For what is presumably a major character return, the aftermath deserved at least another scene.
The MJ Scenes: Every Single One of Them
The bodega moment, Peter spotting Ned and MJ having graduated, returned to New York, living their adult lives, is handled with a lightness that makes it land heavier than any dramatic confrontation could have. Peter looks through a window at the people he used to be, the life that was erased, with no one aware he is there.
And then MJ’s boyfriend turns out to be a genuinely decent person. He is funny. He is kind to Ned. He touches MJ in the small, natural way of someone who loves her. That detail, the new boyfriend being someone you cannot actually hate, is exactly the right creative choice. It would have been easy and cheap to make him a jerk. Instead, Peter has to watch the love of his life be happy with someone good. That is the more painful version of the story, and the film chooses it.
The note MJ finds, the one Peter wrote and never delivered, is set up early and paid off beautifully. The moment her hand closed around it in the theater, the audience collectively held their breath. And then MJ’s response is perfect: I do not love you. I do not know you. The spell worked. And she is not cruel about it. She is just honest. And that, somehow, is worse.
I am glad the film did not fix this by the end. Peter earning his way back to MJ, that is a story worth telling in Spider-Man 5. Resolving it here would have betrayed everything the film was building.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Post-Credits Scene Explained
The post-credits sequence shows the Spidey Tracker, the app New Yorkers use to spot and report Spider-Man sightings, showing Peter’s location in New York, then going dark, then reappearing somewhere off in space.
It does not make logical sense as presented. Whoever logged the space sighting would need to be in space with internet access and awareness of the Spidey Tracker app. The film knows this does not quite track. What it is communicating is simple: the next time we see Spider-Man, he will be somewhere cosmic. My read is Secret Wars, followed by the black symbiote suit entering his story through whatever cosmic encounter brings him back. Which then sets up Spider-Man 5 as the symbiote story.
Spider-Man will return. Not in Avengers: Doomsday. Not in Secret Wars, at least not as a primary arc. Somewhere in space. And whatever he finds there is what Spider-Man 5 will deal with. I have so many theories, and I will keep them for another piece.
What Spider-Man: Brand New Day Gets Right
The character work. Peter Parker has never felt more like the Peter Parker I grew up reading. Alone, responsible, self-sacrificing to the point of self-destruction, and genuinely funny in a way that comes from the character rather than the script, forcing jokes.
The Frank Castle dynamic. The best MCU relationship of the year. Jon Bernthal walks into a Spider-Man film and immediately makes it better without compromising who Punisher is by a single note.
The V-Max reveal. One of the best mystery payoffs the MCU has produced. Full stop.
The Man-Spider arc. The decision to give Peter organic webbing as a consequence of his human side eroding was unexpected, and it works. Using it as an inversion of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 2, that film about not wanting to be a hero, this one about not wanting to be a person, is exactly the kind of creative intelligence the franchise needed.
The MJ scenes. Every single one of them, from the bodega to the rooftop to the note.
The action. The best Tom Holland films have ever been produced. Dynamic, varied, practically and digitally mixed in ways that feel intentional rather than compensatory.
Gan D. Wolf. A genuinely compelling new addition whose famous comic storyline, her death, now hangs over the future of the franchise in a way that is going to make Spider-Man 5 difficult to watch.
Where the Film Has Room to Improve
The montage editing. The seams show. Too many characters appeared on merchandise who barely register on screen. Tombstone deserved his own scene.
Scorpion, Tarantula, Boomerang, Ramrod. Four Spider-Man villains who have never been properly realised in live action. Still waiting.
Tom Holland still does not have his own arch-nemesis. Jean Grey is a great character, and Sadie Sink is good in the role. Jean Grey is not a Spider-Man villain. This is the fourth film in a row where Peter’s primary antagonist belongs primarily to another franchise or another Spider-Man. Scorpion has been patient long enough.
The Yelena spa scene. Goes on too long and leans into cringeworthy Marvel humor that the rest of the film wisely avoids. It should have taken place in Avengers Tower. It would have been better.
Jean Grey kills people. Casually, throughout the film. A taxi driver she mind-controls into traffic. Damage Control employees were made to shoot each other. This is not Phoenix Force territory; this is Jean Grey at baseline doing things that should result in life sentences. The film acknowledges this briefly through Peter and then moves on. A little more weight on that moral dimension would have strengthened the final act.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Pros and Cons
✓ Pros
- Tom Holland’s best Spider-Man performance, finally, the movie the character deserved
- Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is exactly right and makes every scene better
- The V-Max reveal is the best MCU mystery payoff in recent memory
- The Man-Spider / organic webbing arc is genuinely interesting thematically
- Every MJ scene is earned and handled with real restraint
- Action sequences are the best that the Tom Holland films have produced
- Gan D. Wolf is set up beautifully for a future devastating storyline
- Destin Daniel Cretton directs with the kind of personality and character focus the franchise needed
✗ Cons
- Editing scars visible in the opening montage, cut scenes, and characters clearly removed
- Tombstone, Scorpion, Tarantula, and Boomerang are criminally underused
- Tom Holland still lacks a proper arch-nemesis built specifically for his Spider-Man
- The Yelena spa scene is the film’s most indulgent and least necessary passage
- Jean Grey’s casual body count goes largely unaddressed morally
- Hulk’s exit is abrupt for a character returning this significantly
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review Final Verdict
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Direction | ★★★★★ |
| Tom Holland’s Performance | ★★★★★ |
| Screenplay / Story | ★★★★☆ |
| Action Sequences | ★★★★☆ |
| Villain (Jean Grey) | ★★★☆☆ |
| Frank Castle Dynamic | ★★★★★ |
| Emotional Resonance | ★★★★★ |
| Editing | ★★★☆☆ |
| Overall | ★★★★☆ (4/5) |
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not a flawless film. It carries visible scars from a difficult production, sidelines too many of its own villains, and continues the tradition of giving Tom Holland borrowed antagonists rather than building him one of his own. These are real criticisms, and I am not burying them.
But the film around those criticisms is extraordinary. It is the most emotionally honest Spider-Man movie since Spider-Man 2. It has a post-credits scene that felt genuinely exciting rather than obligatory. It gave us the Frank Castle and Spider-Man relationship that nobody knew they needed. It made the V-Max twist work in a way that most MCU MacGuffins never do. And it gave Tom Holland, finally, a film built entirely around what Spider-Man is actually about.
Peter Parker is alone. The city loves Spider-Man. Nobody knows who he is. And he keeps going anyway.
That is the character. Brand New Day finally got it right.
If you’re deciding which movie to watch next, explore our latest reviews of The Odyssey Review, The Westies Review, Moana Live-Action Review, Spider-Man: Brand New Day Post-Credits Scene Explained, Evil Dead Burn Review, The Odyssey Ending Explained, and Night Nurse Review. At NexaFeed, we publish spoiler-free movie reviews, OTT series reviews, ending explained articles, hidden details, and streaming guides covering Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, HBO Max, and the biggest theatrical releases from around the world.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Frequently Asked Questions
Is Spider-Man 4 called Brand New Day?
Yes. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the official title of the fourth solo Tom Holland Spider-Man film, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. It is set four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home and follows Peter Parker operating as an established but anonymous hero in New York.
Is Spider-Man: Brand New Day going to be a movie?
It is already in theaters. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man film, produced by Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures, currently in wide theatrical release.
Who is Sadie Sink in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?
Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey, a telepath who can hop between bodies and minds, who functions as the primary antagonist of Brand New Day. Jean is searching for information about her sister Sarah, who was killed by Damage Control during unauthorized experiments. Though her MCU identity as a mutant is never explicitly stated in the film, she is clearly being positioned as the Jean Grey who will eventually join the X-Men in future MCU projects.
Which Spider-Man is in Brand New Day?
Brand New Day stars Tom Holland as Peter Parker / Spider-Man. The film is the fourth entry in his solo Spider-Man series within the MCU, following Spider-Man: Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home. It does not feature Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters worldwide.
