Mr. Know-It-All on Spider-Man Brand New Day: The Real Problem Was Never the Runtime

About two hours into Spider-Man Brand New Day, I leaned over to my wife in the dark and said, "This could lose 20 to 30 minutes." I hadn't read a review or seen a take. Nobody handed me that. The next day I found out Destin Daniel Cretton had already done exactly that. The assembly ran about 170 minutes and what we watched runs 145. He cut almost the exact amount I was guessing at in the dark, before any of us ever saw the movie, and he has said on the record that the length is right where it should be and that there is almost nothing left on the cutting room floor.

That stopped me. If you cut 25 minutes and the film still plays like those 25 minutes are in there, then the 25 minutes were never the problem. Everyone complaining about this movie's length, myself included in that theater, has been complaining about a number. It was never a number. It's the order.

Escalation with no release explains why viewers feel exhausted, not bored

Here is what the movie is doing. You get a set piece, it's enormous, it works, and it leaves you wrung out in your chair. Before you've come down from that, you get another piece of story: new information, new stakes, a new problem. Then it climbs to another crest and hands you more. Crest, information, crest, information, and you never get a moment to live with any of it. That's escalation with no release, and it's a rhythm problem, not a length problem. Those two get treated as the same note, and they aren't.

By itself that pattern isn't a flaw. Most movies run it all day because most movies don't have peaks high enough for it to cost you anything. This one does. The set pieces are enormous, so you're spending real energy on every climb and getting none of it back. By the fourth or fifth cycle you're not bored, you're depleted, and a depleted person has exactly one sentence available to describe the condition: "Man, this was long." That's the trick this film has played on the entire conversation around it, because the bored viewer and the depleted viewer say the identical six words for opposite reasons. The bored one checks the watch because nothing's happening. The depleted one checks it because too much is happening and he can't process it fast enough to stay with it.

This is the lowest critic score of the four Tom Holland movies and the highest audience score of all nine live-action Spider-Man movies, and both camps walked out saying the same thing about the runtime. When two rooms that agree on nothing land on the same six words, those words are measuring something neither room has actually named.

My own score kept climbing the morning after, without a rewatch

I should tell you where I land, because it's going to sound strange right after everything above. This is my favorite Spider-Man movie ever made, above No Way Home, which I loved mostly for scope, and above Spider-Man 2. I'm the guy who made the length complaint first, unprompted, in the dark, before anybody handed it to me, and I'm also telling you it's the best one. I walked out of the theater with this at a tentative eight. Overnight it went to a nine. Sitting with it now, it's moved higher than that, and I have not watched it a second time.

If I'm right about the depletion in the room, you're paying for this movie physically the whole way through, and that cost sits on top of everything you feel about it in the moment. Then you sleep, the cost clears, and what's left behind is the construction, which is excellent. That's why I don't think anyone who watched this at a press screening and filed that night was lying about what they felt. They wrote it down before the movie had finished happening to them, before it had crystallized.

Sad on purpose is not the same word as dull

My problem with the word that keeps getting stuck to this thing is dull. Sad and downbeat is not dull, and this movie is sad on purpose from the top down. Michael Giacchino stood up at Comic-Con and said, "I want to make a sad Spider-Man movie." Cretton has said in every interview he's given that the whole question driving the film was, "Who is Peter Parker without Ned, without MJ, without Aunt May, without Tony Stark?" That's the assignment. Watching the sad Spider-Man movie and reporting back that it was sad isn't analysis, it's a plot summary with a frown on it.

Four false endings, not a hijacked third act

The smartest argument I've heard against this film says the last stretch hands the movie to a brand new character, stops being about Peter Parker, and turns into a backdoor pilot. I want to be fair to it because it's the only version of the complaint that isn't about mood, it's about architecture. It has the shape exactly right and the cause exactly backwards.

The back half keeps handing you a villain and then revoking it. Jean Grey, played by Sadie Sink, is the threat, jumping through bodies, hitting Damage Control. Then Peter and Frank get the inhibitor onto her neck, Metzger tranquilizes her, and she goes down saying her sister's name, which has the exact shape of a third act resolution. Then MJ mentions almost offhand that she doesn't remember being possessed at all, and the floor drops out, because that means Bill Metzger has been lying to Peter's face the entire picture. Now the antagonist is Damage Control. Then Jean pushes past her own ceiling inside the cell and freezes a mile and a half of Manhattan solid, and now it's her again for a completely different reason. Then Frank takes his shot, Peter takes the bullet, and it reads as an ending one more time. That's four false resolutions, each one charging you right back up. It's the same escalation with no release, except now it's the story running at it instead of the stunt department. The last act didn't get hijacked, it's the movie's own rhythm showing up in a different department.

Refusing to hand anyone the villain chair

There's a take going around that Jean Grey isn't the villain, Metzger is. I don't think that's what happened either. Jean Grey was the antagonist because she was running counter to the protagonist, that's what the word means and the only thing it means, and it doesn't make her the villain, which is why the back half spends its time showing you what was driving her. Damage Control isn't really the villain either. It's a government agency doing what government agencies do, overreaching until somebody makes them sit in front of a committee. The movie refuses to hand anybody the villain chair, and if that's a twist people feel got fumbled, I think it's deliberate and the most grown up decision in the picture.

The Sentinels question buried inside Damage Control's inhibitor tech

Something is still missing from this picture. I don't know if it's an Oscorp connection, I don't know what it is, but whatever Damage Control is being built into is bigger than what the movie showed us. Here's the quiet part: you have a federal agency with a supermax, a black budget, and an active research program building hardware that switches off superhuman ability. That infrastructure has one destination: Sentinels. I'm not telling you that's confirmed, nobody has confirmed anything. I'm telling you that's what the infrastructure is for, and this movie put every piece of it on screen and expected you to be looking at the girl.

I first got nervous not at the Jean Grey reveal but earlier, in a conversation where Peter goes to see Bruce Banner at the college and won't give his real name, introducing himself as Ned instead. They start talking about building an inhibitor, fine at first because Peter's building it for himself, and then the conversation slides slightly into something generalized that would work on anybody. That's restriction collar territory, the front end of power suppression as public policy. I checked afterward and I was years late: She-Hulk already showed Damage Control running a supermax that holds superhuman prisoners using ability-nulling technology since 2022, and Ms. Marvel showed Damage Control in an armed standoff with a teenage girl with powers. Peter isn't planting a seed in that scene, he's handing a design upgrade to a program that's been running for half a decade, with no idea what he's feeding.

Damage Control was born in a Spider-Man movie. They're the reason Adrian Toomes becomes the Vulture in Homecoming, they arrested Peter's entire family in No Way Home, and every time they return they get worse. I'm fairly confident the movie never says the word mutant, not once. It says telepath, it even says enhanced once, and it walks past a hundred opportunities to use the word everyone writing about this film is using. That tells you the term hasn't been coined yet on this timeline, which makes the last shot mean something specific: Jean Grey gets on a bus headed upstate. That's me guessing, but wouldn't you go ask yourself what's upstate.

Practical stunts Jon Watts warned against, and my one real effects complaint

This is a beautifully made movie and I have exactly one real complaint about it, and it's not the one going around. Jon Watts directed the first three of these films and, before this one went into production, said in an interview, "Whoever comes next shouldn't bother shooting the web swinging practically. It's boring. It looks dumb. It looks like a monkey swinging on a vine when you put someone on a rope." Cretton did it anyway. There's a stunt in the first act, a practical fire bomb taking out the ground floor of a building with cars rolling, one take, no second chance, that took a full day to rig, and that approach runs all through the film. When practical work is done right you're not thinking about how it was made, you're just in it, which is the entire reason to spend the money and take the insurance risk, and the marketing spent four months instructing audiences to think about it instead. That's a publicity failure, not a filmmaking one.

I keep seeing people say the CGI in this is bad, and it isn't. The images are beautiful, the grade is doing real work, the comps hold. If that reads as bad CGI to you, that's armchair criticism borrowing a technical word to sound like you know something. There is one real issue: a slow motion shot where Spider-Man sits in the frame and the key light on him doesn't agree with the key light in the environment around him. There's no interactive light coming off the surrounding surfaces, and your eye catches the mismatch a beat before your brain can name it, so for a second he reads as a sticker instead of an object with mass in that space. That's a lighting integration failure, not bad rendering, and those two things are not interchangeable.

The comic book cover freeze frames, and a joke about organic webbing

All the way through, the movie drops into slow motion and recomposes the frame into a comic cover: Boomerang as Amazing Spider-Man 345, the Erik Larsen cover, my favorite artist; Ramrod as 221; Tarantula as 134; running all the way back to Amazing Fantasy 15 from 1962. Cretton's account of how it started is that it began as an idea he thought would be fun to do once or twice, and then close to a hundred covers went up on the walls, and the game became imagining what happened ten seconds before or after each image. I love every one of them as a fan. As a filmmaker, after the fourth or fifth I didn't need any more, which is this entire movie in one bit: a great instinct designed for two uses, shipped at a hundred, and nobody in the room calling the diminishing return. Same escalation with no release, running in the montage department.

Frank Castle is the co-lead, not the cameo, and the rogues gallery is used as texture

Let me correct how this movie got sold. Hulk is the cameo. Frank Castle is the co-lead, and Bernthal is playing a full supporting role with chemistry against Peter that's ridiculous. My first instinct was that Frank sees Peter as the son he never got to raise, but the longer I sit with it, the more it plays as older brother, younger brother. Cretton said something that lines up with that exactly: "John's character is a direct reflection of Peter, and that he's showing Peter what could happen if he goes down a certain road." A reflection and a warning is a brother, not a father.

One note on Hulk as a design choice: Jean uses Professor Hulk as a blunt instrument, and whatever she breaks on the way out lets the Savage version come back reading bigger and more aggressive than he has in a long time, in the silhouette and the animation, not just the writing. I liked that version a great deal, and I'd take a Hulk movie, a Planet Hulk, any of the feature-scale stories sitting on a shelf over a paperwork problem.

The movie opens in media res. We don't pick up where No Way Home left off, four years are simply gone, Peter has already fought Frank Castle before we arrive and fought Scorpion more than once, he's got a routine, an AI assistant and a printer, a small-scale Tony Stark, and none of it gets explained, it's simply true when you arrive. The rogues gallery, Boomerang, Tarantula, Ramrod, Tombstone, appears in a montage as texture telling you what four years looked like, and not one of them drives plot, which I think is the fix for the thing Spider-Man movies have always gotten wrong: stacking six antagonists and demanding they all carry weight. Ramrod is in there because Ramrod is the only villain in this picture who actually appears in the 2008 Brand New Day comic run.

The Hand is a feint, and the comic this movie is really adapting isn't Brand New Day

The Hand is a feint. The campaign sold a Hand movie and they're set dressing, with no Daredevil touchback at all, Frank never references them, and I'd have taken one throwaway line from Ned about a curfew to tie it off. I suspect Marvel is deliberately backing off how tightly the television side connects to the films, and it's probably the safer bet.

Brand New Day, the 2008 comic, is the relaunch right after One More Day, where Peter's marriage is traded away and the world forgets he's Spider-Man, and the mandate was back to basics: broke, single, street level, new supporting cast. That's the branding on this movie and it fits the setup. But the story it's actually adapting is The Other, from 2005, where Peter's body starts changing, he cocoons, comes out with organic webbing, and a far more primal instinct set takes over as the spider side starts winning. Jean says out loud in this movie that the spider is following the man, which is that arc's thesis statement on the page, and in the comics Peter goes to Bruce Banner about it because Banner is who you go to about radiation, exactly what happens here. The joke nobody's told yet: organic webbing is one of the things the real Brand New Day relaunch took away from Peter, so the movie named after the storyline that removed organic webbing is the movie that hands it back to him.

Sarah Grey: an abandoned comics plan resurrected 40 years late

Jean has a sister in this movie, Sarah Grey, whom Damage Control takes and experiments on, killing her while trying to replicate what she could do, and that's the engine of Jean's entire rampage. I checked whether Jean's sister was a telepath on the page, and she's real: Sarah Grey, first mentioned in 1966, first drawn during the Dark Phoenix Saga. In the comics she's not a telepath at all, she's a regular human who marries, has two kids, learns her sister is a mutant, becomes a mutant rights advocate, and is murdered by anti-mutant extremists before being absorbed by the Phalanx.

Chris Claremont's original plan after Dark Phoenix was to leave Jean dead and reveal that Sarah had latent powers, putting her on the team in Jean's place. He never got to run it. Marvel finally brought Sarah back and revealed that dormant ability in a book last year, which means this movie is executing an abandoned Claremont plan about 40 years late. What matters is what changed about how she dies: on the page, bigots kill Sarah Grey. In this movie, a government agency running experiments to replicate her powers kills her instead, moving the threat off of hate and onto the state, the same idea running through the inhibitor conversation earlier, arriving through a completely different door. When one idea shows up three times through three doors, somebody in that room decided it.

The letter, the fake kiss, and Ned at the grave

Peter takes MJ to Frank's place to keep her safe, and she finds the letter he wrote her at the end of No Way Home and never delivered. Earlier in the film, Jean already weaponized that letter, possessing MJ, getting inside Peter's head, finding the letter there, and staging true love's first kiss right in front of him before mocking him with it. It's a horrible thing to do to a person, and the movie knows it. By the time MJ is sitting with the real letter in her hands, we've already been given that exact ending once and had it taken back, the same false resolution beat run one more time in the only department the film hadn't tried it in yet. She reads it and tells him she doesn't remember him, there's nothing in there, the spell simply worked. Then she takes him upstairs anyway, and they hang out with Ned while he's in the suit the entire time, mask on, sitting in an apartment with two people who have no idea who he is. There's a costume motif running under the whole picture: every time Peter is in the mask without the suit, or the suit without the mask, the frame is telling you which half of him is currently driving.

Then the ending: Peter buying flowers for Aunt May's grave, Ned walks in, Peter introduces himself as Peter, and their old handshake just happens, both of them automatically, and Ned looks up and says, "Peter?" There's a reading going around with real evidence under it, that MJ is already remembering and hiding it, since she's on the roof holding a necklace Peter gave her that she has no reason to be holding, and earlier, when Hulk has him completely beaten and Peter says, "It's me, Peter," Hulk hesitates. If you buy those two pieces of evidence, Ned is the second domino and the spell is coming apart. I'm not there, and I know that puts me in the minority. What I think happened is Ned's body ran that handshake on pure muscle memory and then his mouth connected the name he'd just been handed to the guy standing in front of him, which is association, not restored memory. The sling ring magic Ned handled in the last movie could be a factor, and yes, that was contrived, so it's on the table, but I think the simple version is the correct one, and I'd rather tell you what I actually believe and be wrong out loud than take the tidier popular reading.

My final verdict, and a guess about the post-credit scene

Against this movie: it never lets you live with anything, it stacks its peaks until you're depleted and calling that dull, the cover gag outstays itself by a good half dozen appearances, and there's one composite where the lighting doesn't marry. For it: this is the most Spider-Man that Spider-Man has ever been on screen, a picture that opens in media res and trusts you to keep up, a Frank Castle and Peter Parker two-hander I never saw coming, and practical stunt work a previous director of this exact franchise publicly advised against attempting. It walked out of the theater at an eight in my head and has climbed pretty much every hour since without me having watched it again. That's a ten out of ten for me, my favorite Spider-Man movie ever made, and I know that lands strange after everything I've said about the length, but I'd rather be honest than tidy. Cretton has said the whole film grows out of Peter understanding what Aunt May told him and learning across the movie what she actually meant, then putting May inside a memory and handing that lesson, with great power comes great responsibility, to a second lonely kid who has also decided she has to do this by herself.

One more thing: my wife, sitting right next to me when the post-credit tracker pinged past the moon, said out loud, "Wait, why is Spider-Man in space?" That's the only question that mattered walking out of that theater, and I think the answer is Secret Wars. That's a guess, nobody has confirmed that at all.

Do you think Ned actually remembers Peter, or did his hand just run the handshake before his brain caught up?