It is now seven years into the post-Endgame era of the MCU. In 2019, the epic crossover that had just dammed more than a decade of buildup with one of the biggest cliffhangers of all time let loose with a $357.1 million opening weekend haul, beating the previous record-holder, its direct predecessor Avengers: Infinity War, by almost exactly $100 million. This was the third out of four mainline Avengers movies to reset this record – the first Avengers film was the first movie ever to open at more than $200 million way back in 2012, beating the eighth Harry Potter movie by almost $40 million – and the last two did a Super-Mario style double-jump on it at the end.

It is now two weeks into the era of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which barely squeaked past Endgame with a $360.1 million opening weekend haul.

Wait – what?

It’s actually not that surprising. This is partially a simple story of time marching on and the runaway-train inflation of the 2020s – Endgame’s opening would be north of $466 million in 2026 money – but these pairs of films have an enormous amount of overlap, even in their relative performance. Spider-Man does almost the exact same double-jump from film to film, as Brand New Day’s direct predecessor, Spider-Man: No Way Home, also cut in roughly $3 million ahead of Infinity War. Here they are interlaced at no. 1-4 on the all-time domestic opening weekend chart.

Each also benefited massively from cultural dynamics unique to these four films – or at least, it felt unique to Infinity War, and the other three have repeated it. Based on a comic book run from the early ‘90s and with Endgame already wrapped, anyone who was paying attention knew how both films were going to play out, at least in broad strokes. Both Spider-Man films were also shrouded in this style of closely held open secret.

This counterintuitive dynamic creates incredible anticipation, which is what opening weekend numbers measure more than anything. Knowing vaguely what’s going to happen creates not just urgency, but pre-existing emotional investment. These particular comic book movies have succeeded in making broad audiences feel like they’re in the know, like we all get to be nerds in the early ‘00s who are already fans of the adapted characters, and the films and their marketing campaigns combine to play with what information is revealed to get meat in the seats and what is withheld to create word-of-mouth buzz – because the twists and turns, the details of these plots that have already been vaguely revealed, are still the main dopamine course once you get in the theater. The applause breaks in Endgame, No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine, another film that applied these dynamics to great success, serve as a constant, permanent reminder embedded within the runtime that these movies are exclusively for opening night audiences. 

The part that’s actually about the movie

New York City, July 2026- four years after No Way Home, in which Peter Parker (Tom Holland) endured the death of his aunt and saw himself magically stricken from the memory of anyone who ever knew him, Parker lives alone, focusing only on his vigilante career as Spider-Man and watching his former friends enjoy life without him. Thinking he has already sacrificed one of his lives for the other, Parker is suddenly faced with twin crises – his body begins to mutate again, with his spider powers reaching unpredictable and destructive new extremes, and a bodysnatching new villain whose psychic trail only he can perceive.

Well, let’s at least try to start at the beginning – it’s not a very good movie. Brand New Day inherits almost 20 years of Marvel bullshit, and it handles this the way most post-Endgame superhero movies handle this – with a half-hour exposition dump right at the top of the movie. Just when you thought the commercials were finally over, your feature presentation jabs you with a four-years-later montage, crosses with an impromptu tour of the Department of Damage Control so you’ll remember the layout two hours later, and I’ve completely checked out before we get to the power punches of the actual plot. There’s no good way to spend 20 minutes doing what an opening crawl could accomplish in one.

This gets straight to the core of what most people are still enjoying about latter-day Marvel movies, but what I can’t stand – seeing these popular characters flipping through different scenarios, many of which represent celebrated comic runs from over the years. At times, Brand New Day feels like running your hand down the spine of a decades-spanning Spider-Man collection, but I’m sitting in the theater thinking I’ve cracked one open to actually sit with and enjoy. 

Newcoming director Destin Daniel Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak, longtime collaborators who worked on their first films together, bring a distinct new visual panache to the film, most often in pre-web-slinging moments that appear to be handheld shots, combining Parker’s inner turmoil with the visceral thrill of being Spider-Man. These brief moments also feel like a borrowed idea, or at least one that stems from Sony’s Spider-Man video games that have been lavishly praised for bringing players deeper into the moment-to-moment process of swinging through Manhattan in recent installments.

Ironically, the film is at its most disappointing when Parker steps off those dramatic ledges, and we see blitzes of disconnected shots of him bumping into buildings mid-swing, struggling to adjust to his new organic web-shooters, which appear to fire according to their own will. These scenes feel like they belong in a completely different movie, missing the mark both tonally and narratively – this setup ought to make for tense journeys toward crime scenes in which Parker’s webs could betray him at any moment, but instead we get limp, inconsequential comedy beats as he seems to have an entirely unrelated coordination problem. It recalls the previsualization issues of several Marvel movies, where they feel cobbled together from plots written out several different times over the years, because that’s exactly what they are.

What was essentially a shared press tour with The Odyssey – the epic wrapped days after the comic book movie started shooting, and they released two weeks apart – helped push a strange practical shooting narrative, with Holland, who stars in both films, saying that he brought the experience of Odyssey director Christopher Nolan’s production style to Spider-Man. It’s a bitter disappointment then that Brand New Day is still filled with the exhausting exposition dumps and crazy tone swings that make so many Marvel movies tough to watch. Sure, they aren’t digitally compositing throwaway dialogue moments anymore, but that was a small symptom of a massive overarching problem with how and why decisions get made about these movies.  

Perhaps The Odyssey is the most productive comparison. Even as Brand New Day skyrocketed up the all-time charts, it did so while seemingly remaining second fiddle to Nolan’s new epic, which has continued to dominate the cultural conversation and, amazingly, has kept the new Spider-Man movie off some of the world’s largest screens. For almost 20 years now, playing the hottest new thing on the biggest screen in the multiplex has been mandatory for theaters, with two-week turnarounds the norm for even the biggest hits. Now, theaters are emphatically demonstrating that the auteur-driven technical achievement is the more important film, even against the money. It isn’t that clear-cut – there are only a handful of IMAX film-capable theaters in the world and The Odyssey has sold those houses out for months in advance, but how many houses has Spider-Man sold out months in advance, right? The rush to see it in its first weekend is entwined with the idea that Brand New Day will have little cultural staying power, that people probably aren’t going to be talking about this movie years or even weeks from now.

Brand New Day is also strangled by the large roster of returning characters, a customary burden of most MCU entries since the first Avengers movie. This usually appears to be dictated by a cynical combination of availability, popularity and contract obligations, but Cretton insists it’s thematic here, and for once, it seems to be. As Parker frequently loses control of himself, he is matched with the Hulk and the Punisher (Mark Ruffalo and Jon Bernthal), two characters known for their over aggression and its consequences.

Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day below.

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Also out of control is the film’s villain, Jean Grey (Sadie Sink). This is a very different version of the character than has been put to screen before, with prior film versions glued to the Dark Phoenix plotline that has her repressed for the first two movies and then possessed by a star-eating psychic parasite – nothing in between. Instead, they have her basically playing out the life story of Proteus, another bodysnatching X-Men character who is much more directly villainous and short-lived. The film’s frantic scramble to absolve Grey of her crimes gets a little embarrassing, and has become more embarrassing since the film’s release.

The forthcoming Mutant Saga will be a boon to both the MCU and the mutant characters themselves. Many of the most vibrant and fascinating characters in Marvel’s catalogue are limited to the background of X-Men films made in a time when comic book movies still seemed like a fad that would burn out, so it’s refreshing to see a character get to stretch her legs like this in a different context. On the other hand, she appears to have been thrust into a completely different character’s storyline, so name recognition becomes transparently the only point of using her here.   

We can also anticipate the return of traditional queer rights overtones present in most X-Men films, moreso than in most superhero media – they’re loud and proud in Brand New Day, of course. The “found family” themes that are a big part of what people are connecting to in this movie, but there are also extremely queer-coded plot points like Grey’s parents rejecting her, Parker going through a second puberty and choice lines like “I didn’t know you could get that big.”

The part that’s about Sony

Parker hasn’t spent the last four years completely alone. He’s made friends with NYPD detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), whom he talks to on his brand new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, equipped with Galaxy AI. The smartphone was unveiled days before the film’s release and retails for $1,199, but even Spider-Man can afford it at just $50/month for 24 months through Samsung financing. Samsung presents: Brand New Day. Brand new Galaxy.

Watching this character who is so paranoid of being outed again that he’s had a wizard magically erase the memory of anyone who has ever known him call a cop on his personal smartphone that he carries with him in his Spider-suit, a top-of-the-line one that grounds the film in the 2026 surveillance state, could charitably be written off as a joke. ‘80s comedies like Naked Gun and Airplane! became classics with jokes that directly mock viewers’ willingness to suspend disbelief and advertising run amuck, often at the same time.

But this entire movie is advertising run amuck. Every mainline Spider-Man movie for the past 15 years, with contract deadlines mandating there never be a hiatus of more than five years, has incorporated the company’s crass product placement into the runtime, a 25-year-old workhorse who has long forgotten his master desperately trying to pay attention to carrot and the stick at the same time.

Now, Sony has what it’s always wanted – a repeatable path to Avengers-tier success. The frenzy to see this handful of films on their opening weekends was created by, basically, starting rumors and then refusing to confirm them, converting the ecosystem that breathlessly speculates on every new possible detail of comic book movies from an echo chamber into a feedback loop. When Endgame set its seemingly impassable record, no one thought it would ever happen again without another Avengers-esque 10-year setup, but Brand New Day can repeat this cycle every two or three years.

Can a movie that is designed to only be seen on opening weekend be “good?” I certainly can’t recommend it. It’ll be less rewarding for anyone dusting it off on Disney+ in a couple of years when the sequel arrives, presumably right alongside the next new Samsung Galaxy.

Good movies get recontextualized over time. Part of the reason that happens is good movies aren’t trying to sell you this season’s new smartphone.