Zendaya, Jacob Batalon and a ferocious Sadie Sink anchor Destin Daniel Cretton’s most emotionally reflective web-slinger entry yet — a film that finally lets Peter Parker mourn what being Spider-Man has cost him.
There is a version of Spider-Man: Brand New Day that plays it safe. After the multiverse-spanning maximalism of No Way Home — a film that tripled its title character and reached back across two decades of screen history to knot every Spider-Man into a single bow — the obvious move would have been to go bigger again, louder again, more crowded again. The genuine surprise of this fourth solo outing is how deliberately it does the opposite. It reins everything in. It quiets down. And in doing so, it hands Tom Holland the richest, most fully realized version of this character he has ever played.
Five years after Peter Parker made the impossible choice to erase himself from the memory of everyone he loves — saving the world at the cost of his entire life within it — Brand New Day finds him alone with the consequences. He is not the wisecracking kid from Homecoming anymore. He is a young man in mourning: for his Aunt May, for the relationships he can no longer claim, for a version of his own life that everyone but him has forgotten. The film has the confidence to sit in that grief before it starts throwing punches, and that patience is exactly what elevates it.
What makes this work, and what makes it feel like a fitting capstone rather than just another installment, is that Holland has finally caught up to the emotional weight the writing is asking him to carry. He plays isolation without self-pity, longing without whining, and a slow internal unraveling that gives the whole film its pulse. This is an actor who has lived inside this character across four films and now, at last, gets to show us everything he’s learned about him. It is the best work he has done in the suit, and it arrives at precisely the moment the series needs it most.
Directed with real feeling by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by returning franchise hands Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, the film’s smartest structural decision is to stop litigating the multiverse entirely. There is no lore homework here, no exhausting cosmic bookkeeping. Instead, the focus lands where this franchise has always been strongest — on the human being under the mask, and the price of the mask itself.
The premise gives the film something unusual to play with. Because Peter has been erased from memory, the people closest to him — MJ (Zendaya) and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), now graduated from MIT and back in New York — encounter him as a stranger. That conceit is more than a plot mechanism. It lets Holland, Zendaya and Batalon perform their own established, four-films-deep chemistry from an entirely new angle, as people meeting for the first time who don’t understand why the connection already feels so charged. Peter obsessively rehearses the speech that might explain everything, and the ache of watching him try to rebuild something the other two don’t even know they’ve lost gives the film its most quietly devastating scenes. The trio’s dynamic has been lovingly nurtured across four movies, and here it pays off in moments that will leave longtime fans misty-eyed.
That grief has a physical dimension, too. Peter’s psychological strain begins destabilizing the balance of his hybrid DNA, his arachnid side threatening to overpower his human one, his control over both his organic and Stark-engineered web-shooters slipping at the worst possible moments. It’s a clever externalization of his internal state: the more he loses himself emotionally, the more literally he loses command of his own body.
The threat driving the action is one of the more genuinely unsettling the series has attempted — a malevolent force capable of leaping from host to host through telepathic possession, meaning anyone in New York, including the city’s self-appointed protectors, could be the enemy. Cretton renders the effect with woozy, freeze-frame flourishes that keep the menace slippery and hard to pin down, and it fuels several of the film’s strongest set pieces, including a high-speed hijacked-tank chase barreling toward Damage Control headquarters that ranks among the best action Cretton has staged. His work with The Hand — a squad of red-clad ninjas whose gravity-defying wire-fu lets him revisit the choreographic ambition of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — is another standout.
The film is generous with its supporting bench. Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle brings a rough, frenemy warmth that gives the more mature Spider-Man someone to spark against, and the prickly camaraderie between them lands as one of the film’s unexpected sources of heart. Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner turns up teaching physics to students far more interested in the Hulk than the coursework, and where Banner goes, the other guy is never far behind. Tramell Tillman brings cool authority as Damage Control’s director, and Liza Colón-Zayas is a welcome presence as a detective who maintains a bantering phone-friendship with Spidey. There are also two crossover appearances — one from The Avengers corner of the universe, one from the X-Men side — that go well beyond fan service to deliver, respectively, a jolt of mordant humor and a genuine current of unpredictable danger. I won’t name them. Half the fun is not knowing they’re coming, and this is a film worth walking into clean.
The one element I’ll guard most carefully is Sadie Sink. Her character arrives fueled by fury, contempt and a real gift for manipulation, and for a stretch the film lets her operate as a pure antagonist before revealing how much she and Peter actually share — the same devastating kind of loss, channeled in opposite directions. It is the film’s turning point, the moment its clever memory-erasure conceit stops being an interesting formal wrinkle and becomes something that genuinely reshapes the story. Sink is ferocious and, when it counts, quietly heartbreaking, putting a new face and a painful new history onto a familiar name and almost certainly seeding what comes next. That’s all I’ll say.
Michael Giacchino’s score deserves particular credit for holding the film’s two moods in balance, threading melancholy through the quieter passages and swelling into genuine propulsion when the action demands it. It’s the connective tissue between the film’s tenderness and its spectacle, and it never lets either cancel the other out.
Brand New Day is not flawless. The plotting occasionally tangles itself in the kind of convolutions the genre can’t seem to shake, and a couple of transitions land more abruptly than they should. But none of it dents what the film gets profoundly right, which is the emotional reckoning at its center. This is a Spider-Man movie with the confidence to be about loss — about what it costs to do the right thing when the reward is that no one will ever know you did it.
A post-credits tease involving an app of Ned’s invention, and a closing card promising that Spider-Man will return, make clear this isn’t a literal goodbye. But if it were — if this turned out to be the last time Holland pulled on the suit — it would be a near-perfect way to leave. He has grown all the way into this role, and Brand New Day gives him the send-off that growth deserves.
THAT’S A WRAP
A soulful, self-reflective send-off powered by a career-best performance — grief, heart and spectacle in perfect balance, proving this hero was always at his most powerful when he was at his most human.
Jonathan P. Moustakas
CREDITS
Release Date: Friday, July 31
Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Liza Colón-Zayas, Michael Mando, Marvin Jones III, Marisa Tomei
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Screenwriters: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Composer: Michael Giacchino
Cinematographer: Brett Pawlak
Studio: Sony Pictures / Columbia Pictures
Run Time: 2 hours 25 minutes
Rating: PG-13
