Tag Archives: Tom Holland

Yes, There’s Barely a Scene After the “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” End Credits

August 2, 2026 By in Comics/Lit, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tom Holland as Spidey standing in front of prison bars. Face is battered, eyes have turned totally black.

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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“The Odyssey”: In the Shadow of Troy

July 19, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Matt Damon leads several Greek soldiers through a forest and panics.

Bourne-Hur.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oppenheimer afforded Academy Award Winner Sir Christopher Nolan a “king of the world” moment that his hardcore fans had been anticipating for years. Few other directors, if any, could’ve reaped a nine-digit box office take and filled a movie-trophy case with a big-budget historical saga about a haunted man who’s hailed as a hero by his peers for having a singular idea that took a team to execute and ended a lengthy war at the cost of countless innocent lives in the process, only to end the film with a monologue about his hubris, sins, and regrets, all as an admonishment to a humankind too quick to celebrate his body count and one day repeat his mistakes.

Handed a virtual blank check to make all his creative impulses come true henceforth in perpetuity, yet again Nolan defied today’s moneymaking traditions in favor of a pet project: a lavish adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Sixty years ago it might’ve been reimagined as a bloated three-hour musical with far less blood and lots of female backup dancers, but 20th-century filmmakers generally limited themselves mostly to shorter, less sprawling Greco-Roman fantasies augmented by Ray Harryhausen wizardry, almost as if the Directors Guild unanimously decided to leave it alone until that magical day when a Chosen One might rise up and make it happen.

The usual Nolan superfan excitement was muddled by detractors decrying its Hamilton-style casting process that tampered with the strict historical record, not to mention the fact that this is possibly the first Greek epic ever performed entirely in plain American accents — nary an imperious British lilt from the entire cast, not even among its UK-born costars. So far they’ve been pretty mum about the unrealistic portrayals of the Cyclops, the ten-foot-tall super-soldiers, and the conversations with ghosts. I look forward to their three-hour YouTube rants about the Indian-descended Sir Ben Kingsley and the half-Iraqi Andy Serkis each playing real-life, milky-white Englishmen in Young Washington.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Spider-Man: No Way Home” End Credits

December 21, 2021 By in Comics/Lit, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Spider-Man No Way Home!

It wouldn’t be a true Spidey film if Peter didn’t unmask for the final battle.

Here’s the Too Long, Won’t Read version: despite some wonderful interplay among the main cast and the special guests at the heart of the film (and one beautifully meta performance in particular), Spider-Man: No Way Home is my least favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe film since Thor: The Dark World. I’m in the minority on this, but no other 2021 film has aggravated me as much as this box-office leviathan did.

Hope that helps? You’re now free to go. Thanks for stopping by. I do understand. I just need to get the following 5000 words out of my system. Imagine it’s Martin Scorsese’s rapid voice so it’ll move faster.

…

Still here? Cool, but fair warning: it’s been a long time since I front-loaded a movie entry with a courtesy spoiler alert. There’s no way I can adequately express my reactions without moving beyond the trailer-approved plot points and into its numerous surprises, some of which were foretold on various geek clickbait sites and some of which I predicted from the trailers. Really, the courtesy spoiler alert is for real, anything goes. You might find plenty of reasons for irritation with me, but by venturing beyond the courtesy spoiler alert guard post you hereby forfeit the right to count “AAAHH! SPOILERS!” among them.

Once again, for those just joining us: courtesy spoiler alert. Thank you.

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“Onward”: The Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants

March 9, 2020 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Onward!

Are they elves? Goblins? Bugbears? Kobolds? Smurfs? I have no idea.

From the studio that brought you Up and Inside Out, it’s Onward, another in-depth exploration of a directional adverb. Expect more in this series in future adventures such as Diagonal, Hard to Starboard, Thereabouts, and Counterclockwise!

(The word actually appears in-story and makes perfect sense after you’ve seen the movie. As an enticement for luring reticent viewers into the theater, it falls…shortward.)

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Spider-Man: Far from Home” End Credits

July 14, 2019 By in Comics/Lit, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Spider-Man Far from Home!

And now my paychecks are thiiiis big!

The inspired, rambunctious Spider-Man: Far from Home marks Tom Holland’s fifth film as everyone’s favorite put-upon wall-crawler, meaning he’s now done as many Spider-films as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield combined. While every Spidey has had his high points in my estimation, Far from Home may be the best translation to date of the Spidey-era from my own childhood, roughly 1978-1989 plus Marvel Tales reprints of the first sixty issues of Amazing Spider-Man (the entire Steve Ditko oeuvre plus John Romita’s first two years). It’s a winning coda to the emotional pinnacles and pitfalls of Avengers: Endgame, an encouraging sign of heroism to come and a herald of hopefulness for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Fair warning: this entire film follows the events of Endgame and reverberates from its ramifications. If you’re waiting for Endgame to hit DVD and living in the off-grid wilderness has sheltered you from learning of its major MCU-changing moments, you may want to flee now if you want to maintain your cone of silence. (True story: I know at least one person in this very situation. It is possible. I realize it’s hard to imagine, but not everyone in America is as entrenched in online living as you and I may be.)

On another level, anyone with zero foreknowledge of the antagonist Mysterio and his motifs from old Spidey-comics will want to skip the regular “Meaning or EXPLOSIONS?” section because, frankly, it was kind of boring to ruminate on that aspect spoiler-free. I’m not revealing all his secrets or recapping his scenes shot-for-shot, but…well, there’s stuff that spoke to me.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During AND After the “Spider-Man: Homecoming” End Credits

August 19, 2017 By in Comics/Lit, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Spider-Man Homecoming!

Window painting at our local theater. Yes, it has been a while.

If Marvel had simply decided twenty years sooner that Spider-Man films should be made once every three years, and that a different young British actor should play him every time, perhaps fans wouldn’t have fussed about Spider-Man: Homecoming coming so soon after Amazing Spider-Man 2. We’d be used to the rotating lead spot by now. Granted, this would’ve caused seismic shifts in our entertainment timeline — imagine if Spidey had been played years ago by a younger Daniel Radcliffe and left a weird hole in the Harry Potter franchise. Ah, what might have been.

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