Are you ready for…DARK SPIDER-MAN? (No, not Venom.)

Previously on Spider-Man: Five years ago as the pandemic trended downward — been a while! — No Way Home capped off Tom Holland’s first trilogy by ruining Peter Parker’s life even more depressingly than usual. The This Is Your Life fan-service parade of Spideys and Spider-villains from Spider-cinema past were a delight despite the Major Character Death casting a pall, though The Battle of the Spider-Stars fizzled out in its showdown letdown, a blurry mishmash of scaffolds and weightless automata typifying the rushed VFX of many a post-Endgame superhero blockbuster. But the deepest problem was the story structure itself, a betrayal of “With great power comes great responsibility”, the very heart of every version of the Spider-mythos: taking “great responsibility” began with Peter asking Dr. Strange to fix all his problems for him, and ended with him asking Strange to fix all his new problems that “fixing” his old problems caused in the first place. As I wrote in irritation afterward: “Having a fairy godfather wish your problems away isn’t taking Great Responsibility. That’s weaseling out.” That goes for both times.

Any subsequent Spider-film had two options to get unstuck from that morass: either pretend it never happened and reboot the franchise again with yet another new cast; or spend the entire next film climbing out of that hole. Praise be, then, to director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi, Wonder Man) and returning Spider-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers for committing to option B in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Spidey’s ninth solo film and the 38th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s still obligated to invite non-Spider guests and set up future Marvel projects, but within those corporate restraints, Cretton and crew bring back the Spider-basics of comics yore: no multiverse, no intergalactic space travel, nothing otherdimensional or mystical or meta, it’s an intensely metropolitan adventure that returns to Homecoming‘s street-level superheroics, invests time and energy in repairing shattered relationships, whips up a flurry of fun along the way, and lets that Major Character Death count for something besides shock value.

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