The First ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Reviews Are In — and Critics Are Calling It the Best Spider-Man Film in Two Decades

Tom Holland’s fourth solo outing trades multiverse spectacle for grief, restraint and the best performance of his tenure. The early verdict is overwhelmingly positive.

The reviews for Spider-Man: Brand New Day landed this week, and the consensus arrived faster and warmer than almost anyone expected. Tom Holland’s fourth solo outing as Peter Parker emerged from its first wave of press screenings with a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, positioning it as one of the best-reviewed MCU films in years and, according to a striking number of critics, the finest Spider-Man film in two decades.

That framing is not hyperbole invented for a headline. It is the actual language critics reached for. Rotten Tomatoes critics have called it a highlight of the whole franchise and a remarkably coherent, often joyful film offering significant character growth. The sentiment, in various forms, echoes across nearly every major outlet that has weighed in.

A Deliberate Retreat From the Multiverse

The most consistent thread running through the early reactions is relief. After the reality-bending maximalism of No Way Home, critics have responded to Brand New Day‘s grounded, street-level approach as a genuine course correction. The Hollywood Reporter praised the film for foregrounding Parker’s emotional journey over spectacle. Deadline described a film that returns Spider-Man to his roots as a New York crimefighter, calling the result both surprising and heartbreaking.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who came up through intimate independent films like Short Term 12 before entering the Marvel system, has drawn specific and repeated praise for balancing self-reflection with action. The premise gives him unusually rich material to work with. Picking up four years after Doctor Strange’s memory-wiping spell left Peter Parker living entirely alone in a New York City that no longer knows he exists, the film finds him mourning his Aunt May and watching MJ and Ned live lives that no longer include him. It is a film with the confidence to sit in grief before it starts throwing punches.

Holland’s Most Mature Performance

If there is a single point of near-unanimous agreement, it is that Holland has done his best work in the role. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called it his most nuanced and mature Spider-Man performance to date. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney went with never better. USA Today described it as Holland’s most emotionally gripping work ever. After nearly a decade in the suit, the performance critics are responding to is not the wisecracking teenager of Homecoming but a weathered, more solitary Parker carrying real loss. As Jake Cole of Slant Magazine put it, for the first time in his current screen iteration, Spider-Man seems like what he is in the comics: the beating heart of Marvel and its most compelling figure.

A Supporting Cast That Steals Scenes

The ensemble has generated its own conversation. The film features Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle and Michael Mando as Mac Gargan. Bernthal’s Punisher drew specific praise as an unexpected source of both heart and humor, with multiple critics singling out the prickly buddy-comedy energy between the vigilante and a more mature Spider-Man.

And then there is Sadie Sink, whose mystery role fueled months of online speculation. Cretton deliberately kept her character under wraps, and the early reviews suggest the restraint pays off. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek wrote that the film is full of surprises, from the moving storyline to a surprise character, arguing that even with its flaws the film is superior to most Marvel entries.

A Near-Perfect Curtain Call for Holland

Our own review, published this week, lands firmly with the film’s champions. We gave Brand New Day four and a half stars out of five, calling it a near-perfect curtain call and the richest, most fully realized version of the character Holland has ever played. The film’s smartest decision, in our reading, is to stop litigating the multiverse entirely and return to what this franchise has always done best: the human being under the mask, and the price of the mask itself.

The memory-erasure premise, which could have been a mere plot mechanism, becomes the film’s emotional engine. Because Peter has been erased from memory, MJ and Ned encounter him as a stranger, letting Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon perform their 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. Sadie Sink, in our assessment, is the turning point: ferocious and, when it counts, quietly heartbreaking, putting a painful new history onto a familiar name and almost certainly seeding what comes next. This is a soulful, self-reflective send-off that proves this hero was always at his most powerful when he was at his most human.

The Dissent Worth Noting

No honest account of the reviews would omit the dissent. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman found the film more busy and self-serious than emotionally involving, describing it as watchable without ever being transporting. Rolling Stone’s David Fear delivered a scathing review headlined that the film is the same old thing. These are not trivial objections, and they cluster around a real tension between the film’s runtime and its dual obligation to tell a self-contained story while setting up what comes next. But even the harshest mainstream takes describe the film as merely watchable rather than actively bad. The floor is high.

Worth noting for context: at 91%, this is technically the lowest critics’ score of Holland’s Spidey movies, though all four remain Certified Fresh — a measure of how high the bar was set rather than any real stumble. Whether Brand New Daycan match the series high of No Way Home‘s $1.92 billion global haul remains to be seen, but the critical foundation it opens on is about as strong as the genre gets right now.

Where the Market Stands

See where the Spider-Man: Brand New Day Rotten Tomatoes market stands right now, updated live, below.

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The critical reception hasn’t stayed confined to the trade pages. On Kalshi, traders have spent weeks pricing the film’s final Rotten Tomatoes standing, and the movement tracks the reviews almost beat for beat. The forecast climbed above 92% in the hours before the embargo lifted, buoyed by early buzz, before drifting into the mid-to-high 80s as the actual spread of scores clarified. Traders currently give the film strong odds of finishing above 85, roughly even money on holding above 90, and long odds of cracking 95 — confident it’s very good, far less certain it’s airtight, which maps almost exactly onto the critical consensus itself. The market resolves August 3 with Rotten Tomatoes verifying the final score, and with the film sitting right around the 90 line, every review that posts before Monday could still tip the top thresholds either way.

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