The box office momentum behind Brand New Day is impressive, but it is hardly shocking given Sony and Marvel’s recent track record with live-action Spider-Man films. Spider-Man: Homecoming and No Way Home both opened above $100 million, while Far From Home reached $185 million in just six days. What sets Brand New Day apart is the speed with which it has broken records and established itself as one of the most successful partnerships yet between Marvel and Sony.
Its success is a reminder that audiences still show up for large-scale superhero spectacle when the ingredients are right. The problem for Marvel is that many of the qualities helping this Spider-Man entry connect with viewers have been missing from the Sony-free corners of the MCU.
Editor’s note: This post contains Spider-Man: Brand New Day spoilers.
Jon Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy eventually stepped into multiverse territory, but at its core, it remained centered on contained stories that built a believable world around Tom Holland’s Peter Parker. That focus gave Peter’s growth as an independent hero real weight and made his Avengers-related detours feel more meaningful rather than obligatory.
Brand New Day finds director Destin Daniel Cretton and cowriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers threading the needle between Sony’s standalone Spider-Man sensibility and Marvel’s appetite for crossover spectacle. Familiar figures from Spider-Man’s orbit, including Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Michael Mando’s Scorpion, get plenty of room for explosive set pieces. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is also part of the chaos, but the movie’s emotional center remains Peter as he grapples with the fallout from making the world forget he ever existed.
That premise may sound outlandish, particularly for viewers who do not follow comics closely, but it works because Sony and Marvel’s earlier Spider-Man films carefully prepared the ground. Someone could watch Watts’ trilogy and walk into Brand New Day with a clear sense of the stakes and where the characters stand emotionally. The broader MCU has had a much harder time sustaining that kind of cohesion throughout the sprawling Multiverse Saga, which began with WandaVision and is set to conclude with Avengers: Secret Wars. Marvel has been juggling far more films and series than Sony, which recently slowed its push into Spider-Man spinoffs. Still, the uneven response to trailers for the studio’s next major release suggests audiences may not be fully sold on what comes next.
Avengers: Doomsday is expected to reunite many of Marvel’s heroes against a version of Doctor Doom played by Robert Downey Jr. The film will likely lean on the multiverse to explain why Doom looks identical to Iron Man, and it is also set to fold several live-action 20th Century Studios X-Men characters into the MCU. With Doomsday and next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel appears determined to close the book on the Multiverse Saga and reset after years of an increasingly unwieldy franchise.
Those movies, along with Downey Jr.’s return, also signal Marvel’s effort to move beyond the Kang-centric future it abandoned after parting ways with Jonathan Majors. Kevin Feige has been clear that new versions of the X-Men will be central to Marvel’s next chapter. But if the studio wants audiences to truly care about Charles Xavier and his students, it should pay close attention to what makes Brand New Day land so effectively.
Rather than introducing Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey as a charming telepath, Brand New Day presents the character as a teenager willing to destroy anyone who gets in her way as she searches for her sister. Both of the Greys are mutants with natural abilities that make them dangerous, but what pushes Jean to deadly violence is the way the government is hunting them down in hopes of weaponizing them. By framing Jean as one of its villains, Brand New Day both keeps its story relatively grounded and gives you a way of understanding how the MCU is touching on classic elements of X-Men comics lore. Jean might not want to hurt innocent people, but she does in a very public way, and it’s easy to imagine her actions becoming the basis for human-mutant tensions going forward.
Brand New Day’s ability to tap into those ideas without feeling like a stealth X-Men movie is one of the more impressive things about it. And now that Spider-Man has given us a promising taste of the MCU’s new mutants, Marvel has a chance to keep audiences hooked if it doesn’t drop the ball like Fox.
