Four years after No Way Home erased Peter Parker from every memory but our own, Marvel and Sony hand Tom Holland the thing this trilogy always owed him: a Spider-Man movie where he’s actually alone. No mentor cameo bailing him out, no multiversal safety net. Just a broke, exhausted twenty-something swinging around New York with nobody left who remembers who he is. Spider-Man: Brand New Day takes that premise and, for once, actually commits to it — and the result is the best Holland Spider-Man film yet.
Tom Holland Finally Gets to Act, Not Just React
Every previous Holland outing had a safety net — Tony Stark, Doctor Strange, two other Spider-Men standing next to him. Brand New Day strips all of that away, and it’s the best thing that’s happened to this character in a decade. Director Destin Daniel Cretton lets Holland actually carry the isolation of the premise: a Peter Parker who’s erased himself from the lives of everyone he loves and is fraying at the edges because of it. Holland has always been a solid Spider-Man; here, for the first time, he’s genuinely great — angsty without whining, exhausted without moping, still funny without the film using the jokes as an excuse to avoid the harder emotional beats.
The MJ material is where that isolation cuts deepest. Zendaya’s back as MJ, but she genuinely doesn’t remember Peter — the spell worked exactly as intended, and the film doesn’t cheat that for easy sentiment. When she finds the letter Peter left her at the end of No Way Home and confronts him about it, she’s blunt about it: she feels nothing. It’s a colder, more honest beat than these movies usually allow themselves, and it makes Peter’s loneliness feel earned rather than performed.
The Mystery Villain, and the Twist That Actually Earns Itself
The plot kicks off with Peter tracking a runaway military tank tearing through the city — inside it, a confused woman with no memory of how she got there. He quickly realizes she’s been mind-controlled, and she’s not the only one: someone is jumping consciousness from body to body across New York, using captured people — including, at one point, Scorpion — as puppets to needle Spider-Man and probe the Department of Damage Control’s headquarters. For most of the runtime, the film keeps this telepath’s identity deliberately obscured, and it’s a smart choice — it lets Peter, and us, treat her as a straightforward threat before the movie flips the frame entirely.
She’s eventually revealed to be Jean Grey, played by Sadie Sink in what turns out to be her MCU debut as the character — and the reveal recontextualizes everything that came before. Jean isn’t after some weapon or power grab; she’s searching for her sister, who was taken and killed by Damage Control. The agency’s director, Bill Metzger, has been steering Peter toward hunting her down the entire film, and it’s only in the third act that his own culpability comes out — Damage Control, not Jean, is the actual villainous organization here. It’s a genre-standard “the real monster was the institution all along” twist, sure, but Cretton earns it by letting Jean’s motivations track logically all the way through rather than dropping the reveal as a cheap swerve.
Jon Bernthal’s Punisher: The Best Odd-Couple Team-Up Marvel’s Made in Years
If Holland is the backbone, Jon Bernthal is the reason this movie sticks with you afterward. His Frank Castle doesn’t soften for the crossover — he’s still the same brutal, no-nonsense vigilante from his Netflix days, and pairing him with Spider-Man’s earnest idealism should not work as well as it does. Every scene between them crackles. Bernthal plays Castle with total conviction, and the friction between his scorched-earth methods and Peter’s refusal to cross that line gives the movie its sharpest, most memorable stretches. This is a scene-stealing performance in the truest sense — the kind that makes you wish the Punisher got his own theatrical film instead of another streaming series nobody watched in time.
Action That Actually Understands the Character
The set pieces here are a genuine step up. Cretton and his team clearly understand that Spider-Man’s appeal isn’t just punches — it’s momentum, verticality, a guy improvising his way through a fight using buildings as a jungle gym. That opening tank chase through the city, capped by Frank Castle literally driving it straight into the Department of Damage Control’s building, is one of the best “how did we get here” cold opens the franchise has done. The aerial choreography through New York feels kinetic in a way the last few MCU entries have lost.
The centerpiece, though, is the Hulk sequence — Jean, cornered and desperate, seizes control of Bruce Banner’s mind and rips off the inhibitor keeping him contained, and suddenly Spider-Man and the Punisher have to team up against a fully unleashed Hulk tearing through a skyscraper. It’s a genuinely great use of Mark Ruffalo, and pairing Holland’s improvisational, keep-your-distance style against Bernthal’s blunt-force approach to the same problem gives the sequence a texture most Marvel team-ups don’t bother with — these two solve the same fight completely differently, and the film lets both approaches matter.
And the climax earns its stakes. When Jean’s grief over her sister spirals her powers out of control and freezes half the city, Peter’s the one who talks her down — only for Frank to fire a shot meant to end the threat permanently. Peter takes the bullet for her. It’s Jean, ironically, who saves his life using the same psychic ability that made her the film’s apparent villain twenty minutes earlier. That’s a real payoff, not just a spectacle beat — the plot mechanics and the character arc land in the same place at the same time, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.
Light-Hearted Without Being a Joke
Here’s what impressed me most: this is a genuinely fun movie that never undercuts itself. Post-Endgame Marvel has had a real problem with quippy self-awareness draining the stakes out of every serious moment. Brand New Day doesn’t fall into that trap. It’s funny when it wants to be funny and dead serious when it needs to be — the tonal control is sharper than almost anything the studio has put out since before the multiverse arc buried everything under crossover fatigue. Peter’s loneliness is played straight, Castle’s brutality is played straight, and the humor exists around those things instead of undermining them.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the film this trilogy has been building toward without ever quite getting there — until now. Tom Holland delivers his best performance in the role by a wide margin, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is one of the best supporting turns Marvel has produced in years, and the action finally feels like it understands what makes this character worth watching. The Jean Grey reveal is a genuine swerve that actually pays off instead of just existing to set up the next crossover, the Hulk sequence gives Holland and Bernthal a real showcase for two completely different ways of solving the same problem, and the climax — Peter taking a bullet for the woman he spent the whole movie chasing down as a threat — lands with more weight than this franchise has earned in years.
JAY’S VERDICT
It’s rare for a franchise seven films deep to still find a genuinely fresh angle, and rarer still for it to be this much fun while doing it. If you’ve been burned out on Marvel, this is the one that might pull you back in.
