Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) Review

Cinemagoers could hardly blame Peter Parker for wanting a quiet life. Tom Holland’s webslinger has fought alongside the Avengers, died in a cloud of cosmic dust and persuaded the entire world to forget that he ever existed. Yet the most telling sign of his maturity in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is considerably less dramatic: he now stretches before a fight. “I’m not in high school anymore,” he admits, sounding less like a superhero than someone preparing for five-a-side after an overly ambitious weekend.

That slightly battered quality runs through Destin Daniel Cretton’s lively fourth chapter in the Holland series, which finds Peter older, lonelier and returned, at last, to the New York streets where Spider-Man belongs. The universe is no longer tearing open above his head. There are muggers to catch, neighbourhood crimes to interrupt and an increasingly uneasy partnership with Frank Castle, AKA the Punisher, whose preferred method of law enforcement tends to involve making sure nobody is left capable of reoffending.

For Peter, however, the events of No Way Home remain painfully unresolved. MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) have continued with lives in which their former friend has been erased, leaving him to watch from a digital distance. His attempts to drift back into their orbit have the excruciating awkwardness of a school reunion attended by someone nobody recalls inviting.

There was always something puppyish about Holland’s Peter, a sense that he might save the city and then immediately worry that he had been rude to somebody while doing it. That eagerness is still there, though it now comes with a faint drag of exhaustion. Almost ten years have passed since Captain America: Civil War, and Holland no longer needs to broadcast that Peter has grown older. Instead, it’s shown in his delayed grin, quieter delivery, and the moments when the jokes fail to disguise how much he is carrying.

The scenes between Peter and MJ cut deepest. Their earlier romance could sometimes feel like an appealing high-school crush inflated to blockbuster proportions. Here, the imbalance is more affecting: he knows the shape of their shared past while she encounters him as a stranger, albeit a strangely familiar one. Zendaya gives MJ a wary curiosity that prevents her from becoming merely an object of Peter’s sorrow, while Holland captures the peculiar pain of missing somebody who is standing directly in front of you.

It helps that Cretton allows New York to become more than a digitally rendered assault course. Peter clings to brickwork, drops into side streets and swings through a city that appears inhabited rather than assembled. Some visual effects retain the glossy weightlessness that has plagued recent superhero fare, but the best action has a springy, almost slapstick ingenuity. Spider-Man tumbles, improvises and occasionally seems surprised when his own manoeuvres work.

Jon Bernthal’s Punisher makes an enjoyably blunt counterweight. Where Peter sees criminals who might still be saved, Castle sees unfinished paperwork. Their arguments have something of the mismatched-cop comedy about them, except that one officer wears a mask and the other would happily turn a routine arrest into the closing minutes of a particularly bloodthirsty western. Bernthal’s severity gives Holland’s decency something solid to push against.

Elsewhere, the Marvel guest list becomes harder to justify. Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner bring familiar pleasures, although their appearances occasionally expose the bolts holding this shared universe together. Just as Brand New Day settles into its pleasingly grubby neighbourhood rhythm, another recognisable face arrives to remind us that no Marvel hero is permitted to remain neighbourhood-sized for long.

The mystery antagonist, able to leap between and possess ordinary New Yorkers, introduces an unexpected dash of supernatural horror. Peter’s own powers are misbehaving too, his arachnid biology apparently developing ideas beyond the original job description. Cretton finds some queasy fun in limbs, identities and loyalties slipping out of their usual alignment, though the villain remains more intriguing as a mechanism than as a personality.

Sadie Sink’s closely guarded role should remain so. Suffice to say that she brings a spiky emotional gravity to the proceedings and reflects Peter’s isolation from a different angle, adding another lonely figure to a film crowded with people who have become disconnected from themselves, their families or the world beyond their chosen armour.

There is a great deal going on, perhaps too much. Yet returning writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers mostly resist turning the film into homework for the next Avengers event. The plot bends under the weight of its supporting characters but doesn’t quite buckle, largely because Holland keeps pulling attention back towards Peter’s smaller, sadder predicament.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day doesn’t tear up the Marvel rulebook, and there are moments when the next crossover can be heard rattling around backstage. Still, this feels recognisably like a Spider-Man film rather than another chapter in an endlessly expanding corporate saga. Peter is back among brick walls, bad decisions and people who need help for reasons that have nothing to do with the multiverse. He still gets flattened, naturally. The difference is that the knocks now seem to register somewhere beneath the mask. The costume remains bright, the punches remain plentiful and the city still needs saving. Peter, though, looks as if he could use saving too.

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer