Four years after preserving the multiverse by wiping his memory from those around him, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has been turning Spider-Man from a cosmic hero into one who stays closer to home. With overall crime down in New York City, it is business as usual when he gets a call about a prison break that grants Scorpion (Michael Mando) his freedom, but when he arrives on the scene, he realizes there is something even bigger at play. As he works his way to the center of the crime, the life he left behind – girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and childhood friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) – return to the city after their graduation from MIT, and the new threat against Spider-Man is all too happy to use them as bait to lure him out of hiding.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings in to save the day for the floundering Marvel Studios, hoping to fascinate an audience tired and confused by Phases 4 and 5, reinvigorating them ahead of Avengers: Doomsday (2026). A joint production with Sony, director Destin Daniel Cretton takes over the franchise from the previous trilogy helmer, Jon Watts, while retaining the writing team of Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Running 124 minutes, making it the second-longest of the Holland-starring title features, the film revels as a street-level caper for much of the first act, but the multiverse still looms large over the film, slowly co-opting Spidey’s story as a runway for Disney‘s X-Men.

After the massive success of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) that led into the fraught Phase 4 for Marvel, Kevin Feige is once again leaning on the friendly neighborhood webslinger he shares joint custody with Sony. Sony, likewise, is also happy to see their hero swing from the skyscrapers, as they have also struggled to launch a side franchise across the villains’ roster for the property. Brand New Day marks something of an evolution for the character, not only cementing Holland as the first actor to hold the title role in a Spider-Man film for four times, but both on the page as a character and on the screen as a film, this property is tipping into more adult territory for Marvel, coming down from the cosmos for a ground-level fight and, visually, cinematographer Brett Pawlak eschewing the dark, drab planetary color palette established by James Gunn and the Russo Brothers. The film still boasts plenty of grey hues, but even still, the colors come mostly from the mortar and cement of the city rather than filters that just help mask the effects’ edging, and it allows for the flashes of red from Spidey’s suit to really pop against the backgrounds. It all helps to create a much more organic-looking image than even the terrestrial set early era films from Joss Whedon. This more mature coloring never tips so far into the dark and dour colors seen in Christopher Nolan‘s imagining of Gotham City – or Matt Reeves‘ for that matter – but it does mark a clear departure from what has become something of a house standard for Marvel.

Other new features of the film include a much more dynamic swing, allowing Holland to lean into his dance training and convey his character’s emotion through movement as he traverses the city. Without all the tech creating a cruise control, we see Spider-Man swing with rapid purpose when reporting to an incident, more carefully as he sweeps MJ off to safety, and with furious abandon when he realizes he has been tricked. Additionally, Brand New Day offers a fresh take on action for the series, especially in the showdown against The Hand, a clan of ruby-red-clad ninjas. There is some puzzle-solving going on in the scene, and from Peter’s perspective, we begin to tease out the rules of engagement as if we were controlling the character in a video game boss fight. It is a neat way to slyly engage the audience and, again, since Pawlak is allowed to shoot and light the scene against the house style, the action is presented with both colors and clarity that tend to be sorely missed under the main Marvel tent, and when Peter’s eyes turn black from the Arachnid Metamorphosis, we take notice because there were so few darker colors used when we were with him. Brand New Day is not without the grey melee, however, as a schlocky showdown between Spider-Man and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) offers up plenty of rubble clouds somewhere near the midpoint. It is a disappointing step back in the storytelling, as it limply ties up a long-in-the-tooth ancillary storyline that otherwise was rounding a narrative corner and offering some poignant character moments for both involved.

A “brand new day” also brings about some brand-new characters – sort of – by most notably welcoming Punisher (Jon Bernthal) into the cinematic fold. Bernthal brings a sharper element to the film, creating a brasher tone while still staying comfortably within the confines of a PG13 rating. Through the conceit of the plot and the passage of time, we also get introduced to a newer version of Peter, MJ, and Ned that feel fresh and different because they have been absent from our lives – and within the film, absent from each other – for the last few years. McKenna and Sommers also wisely do not open the film with a montage to catch us up to speed on how these characters got to where they are, so that when they reenter Peter’s life, it is a true reintroduction. The real new character here, ripped from the headlines of the Daily Bugle, is Scorpion, a terrorizing menace that we never feel is a true narrative threat despite filling the role of the Big Bad until, during one of his showdowns with Spidey, we realize there are other forces at play. Now that Disney has absorbed Twentieth Century Fox, they are finally beginning to break open the toy chest and pull out the X-Men action figures that have mostly been out of their grasp, specifically Jean Grey (Sadie Sink), while also having teased Professor X in the Avengers: Doomsday trailer that runs ahead of the film.

This sneaky reveal is why Scorpion is such a lame duck of a villain because Brand New Day, despite being a Spider-Man movie, cedes control from their webslinger for about 45 minutes in the third act to focus instead on Jean Grey. Thankfully, though, Sink excels in this role and creates a deeply affecting portrayal of a villain who is the hero in her own story. Scorned after the Department of Damage Control abducted her sister, Sara (Olivia Booth-Ford), Jean uses her telepathic powers to find information about “V-Max,” a recurring image which she intercepts from her sister and that she believes is key to reuniting with her. The effort, it is revealed, is too late, and Sara has died while in department custody. Seeking revenge, Jean freezes all of Staten Island in a powerful, telepathic burst of energy. In the lead-up and elsewhere in the city, Spider-Man is frantically trying to get to her to try and convince her not to turn her powers on the innocent, while Punisher places his faith in his trigger finger to save the day.

While these machinations may be thrilling for those in the know – and there is plenty to be argued on both sides of the debate on who this movie is, and also who these movies should be for – what McKenna and Sommers do in regards to Peter Parker as a character in this third act is enough to redeem the corporate-mandated story points. Brand New Day had laid the seeds of being a deeply emotional story to this point as Peter struggled with regret while he reconciled with his choice to remove himself from the lives and the memories of people he holds most dear. It does this by carefully folding in the reunion scenes with him and the gang, not in a way that is exploitatively nostalgic, but in a way that is integral to the plot. Across the second act, it reintroduces us to the fun camaraderie shared between Peter and Ned while balancing that angst of the reconfigured will they/won’t they relationship dynamic of him and MJ.

Back in the third act, after having taken a bullet and now recovering in the hospital without anyone really left beyond frenemy Frank, the city rallies in the block below his hospital room, cheering night and day, encouraging messages to their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. In a character-redeeming moment for Frank, he concocts a humorous plan that allows Peter to escape the hospital under the disguise of just another young man in a city of 8.5 million people. As he walks through the crowd, audiences will find themselves getting choked up along with Peter as people of all ages gather and chant, reminisce, and wave their signs of love and appreciation. It wraps Brand New Day up as a surpassingly effective depression narrative, and without dragging audiences through the trenches as films that deal with the concept of suicide often do or force these characters to spend scenes exchanging therapy speak with each other, it presents its message of the preciousness of life in a way that is, like Spider-Man, for all ages. Given the widespread appeal of both the character and Holland’s specific rendition of the character on the big screen, the film can uniquely find its message taking root in the hearts of some of the more vulnerable or prone to harm segments of its audience, meeting them wherever they may be without being pandering or condescending.

Despite the reinvention, Brand New Day is dragged down by the same multiversal weight that has plagued this branch of the franchise since Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). Holland, as the face of the franchise, has charm enough to spare in the role that has become something of a signature for the actor. His love for the character shines through all of the corporatization, and he is all too eager to jump back into that suit and inspire the imagination of an audience that very well could have grown up alongside him. The core trio is the true heart of the franchise, and as long as they keep showing up with the same enthusiasm to humanize these characters off of the comic book frame and onto the silver screen, they can melt away the cynicism surrounding the Marvel Industrial Complex and deliver truly enjoyable stories about the enduring and endearing power of friendship; a theme which can be grafted onto the life experiences of the audiences across all stages of their lives.