Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review: The Most Grounded This Franchise Has Ever Been

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Destin Daniel Cretton directs Spider-Man: Brand New Day, his first film in the franchise.

This film is exceptional. It’s already past $2 billion at the box office, and there’s a real chance it becomes the first film to reach $3 billion.

This film is grounded in all the best possible ways. It plants itself in New York City and feels like a real city movie. The Spider-Man and Black Widow scene about big potatoes and small potatoes shows it clearly: it sets up the Avengers and reintroduces Black Widow to people who haven’t seen the new Avengers or Thunderbolts, while keeping the Spider-Man story a citywide thing. That was smart. Showing all the villains he’d already fought at the very start was a clean way of saying four years had passed. The ending shots of New York were a quiet still life, almost a day-in-the-life sequence, and that’s what cemented how grounded this movie, and hopefully this franchise going forward, really is.

It is a long movie. After the second act, I whispered to myself, “wow, this has more story left, huh,” and I resisted checking my watch, but my body knew it had been a while. I didn’t feel that watching The Odyssey the week before.

The story makes sense. It’s tightly knit and compact, and it stays focused on the people and their relationships. It’s built well. This is a movie breaking box office records, and it proves the franchise model was never the problem. The problem is relying on a franchise instead of investing in good storytelling, good direction, and a cast that can act. That matters more than whether it’s a franchise or a new IP.

I love that these are getting people back into the cinema. So far in 2026, that’s The Odyssey, Obsession, Backrooms, and Project Hail Mary. Not everything on that list is a new story, but every one of them proves the same thing: craft still gets people into a theater. I’m tired of the idea that all the stories have been told and nobody wants to go to the movies anymore. That’s not true. There’s always a new way to tell a story, even if the haters insist otherwise.

★★★★★.

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