Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review: A Bleak Reset, With Zendaya Holding It Up

Yes, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is worth watching, with one warning about the length. Destin Daniel Cretton's reset of the franchise is a bruised and quiet film about a man nobody knows, and the sadness in it arrives late. It also runs long, and the climax is over before the characters are. Both facts matter.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it, and give it the time it takes, because the last stretch is where the picture earns its sadness. A 145-minute superhero drama carried by Tom Holland and Zendaya. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 90 percent from 439 critic reviews, while Metacritic has it at 66 from 56 critic reviews, and the gap between those two numbers is the argument in miniature. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about

Peter Parker erased himself from the world's memory at the end of No Way Home to save it, and four years on he lives alone in a rusted New York attic with a wall of screens and no friends. MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) are at MIT and do not know him. He works full-time as Spider-Man, which by the start of the film means taking small jobs, wearing a mask, and going home to nobody.

Then a body-hopping psychic outbreak starts eating the city, and the Department of Damage Control (Tramell Tillman) contracts Spider-Man to stop it. He thinks the threat is a mind controller, and the body it lands in most often belongs to a grandmother who looks a great deal like Aunt May, or a jogger, or a security guard. A hospital, a police ring, a skyscraper. Peter's head starts hurting. His body starts changing. Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) turns up in the middle of an action set piece, and Owen Gleiberman at Variety had a blunt description of why: mostly "so we can have some Hulk time." Florence Pugh's Black Widow meets him in a plunge pool, and Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian caught exactly how it looks: "shy Spidey joins her while wearing his mask and also underpants."

The middle of the film is Peter following MJ around New York, watching her with a new boyfriend, and not saying anything. That is the movie's real subject, and it is an unusual thing for a Marvel picture to spend an act on.

Cast and performances

Tom Holland is 30 and playing a man, not a boy, and the change reads in the shoulders. He stands differently in the mask, and the tiredness in the voice is real rather than performed. Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian caught exactly this when he wrote that Holland is "back as the vexed webslinger in a sometimes shocking, occasionally sluggish new instalment".

Zendaya gets the best material in the film. MJ is a civilian with a career and a boyfriend and no idea the man she is talking to in a coffee shop saved the world twice. Bradshaw's verdict is flatly stated: "Zendaya saves this film. She rescues it from silliness and the generic deja vu overfamiliarity that is always threatening to sink it." Her scenes are the ones where the picture is about a person rather than about a franchise.

Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey and is the most interesting new thing in the MCU, an X-Man with a rewritten origin and a reason for what she does. Jon Bernthal's Punisher is a small, abrasive performance as the one other person in New York who understands being alone with a secret. Jacob Batalon gets the best joke in the film. Marisa Tomei appears as a voice inside Peter's head, and the film uses her sparingly enough that it lands.

What works

The isolation. The apartment, the gig work, the fact that the hero is anonymous and nobody in the crowd is cheering. Amy Nicholson at the Los Angeles Times named the franchise problem in her headline, with the film "finds its nimble hero tangled by franchise upkeep". The detail that sells the new powers is the one where Peter cannot switch them off.

The body horror, handled lightly. Bradshaw described the change as a disquieting development that coincides with "unprecedented new physical and mental health issues for Parker", and put it plainly: "He has headaches, and these appear to be taking our hero to what I can only describe as the David Cronenberg zone." It is the most adult thing a Spider-Man picture has attempted, and it is played as a burden rather than a power-up.

What doesn't

The padding. Nicholson pointed at the cause: "Screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers add too much padding with their need to include the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), the new Black Widow (Florence Pugh) and the government's increasingly radicalized Department of Damage Control", all of it in place before this December's "Avengers: Doomsday." Owen Gleiberman at Variety reached the same verdict from the other side, calling the film "arduous, overly episodic, and half an hour too long."

The romance, and this is the sharpest criticism in the film. Peter watches MJ with another man and it does not change. Gleiberman put it as "We want the relationship between Peter and MJ to be a journey, not a frozen piece of sad irony." The film stalls there for longer than the material can carry.

The over-working. Cretton is trying hard to make a comic-book movie that is thoughtful and humane, and Gleiberman's line is the fairest summary of the failure: "you feel how hard he's working to craft a comic-book movie that's thoughtful, humane, and 'mature.' But when you can feel how hard a movie is working to be those things, it tends to detract from the goal."

What audiences say

All figures checked on October 21, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 90 percent from 439 critic reviews, with a 97 percent Popcornmeter from more than 25,000 verified ratings. Metacritic has a Metascore of 66 from 56 critic reviews, labelled Generally Favorable, plus a user score of 7.9 from 1,120 user ratings. IMDb has it at 7.9 out of 10 from 360,000 ratings. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 4.03 from 4,580,007 ratings, with 2,006,580 written reviews and 55,000 fans following the film. TMDB has it at 8.5 from 5,841 votes.

The critical panels split. The 439 critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked the film; the 56 on Metacritic rated it lower, with a 66 the lowest score any of the aggregators gave it. The audience numbers point the other way, with Letterboxd members at 4.03 out of 5 and a 97 percent Popcornmeter, which says people had a good time.

Box Office Mojo's 2026 worldwide chart, read on October 21, 2026, has the film at $958,315,789 domestic and $2,516,315,789 worldwide, first among 2026 releases.

Where to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day

There is no subscription service for it in the United States yet. JustWatch checked 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and lists it for rent on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, and for purchase on the same three. TMDB adds Google Play Movies and YouTube to the rental list, and the digital release date was October 6, 2026. It is also on disc, with 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD dated December 15, 2026 in the US. The certificate is PG-13 for a 2 hour 25 minute run.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Spider-Man: Brand New Day streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Spider-Man: Brand New Day worth watching? Yes, if you like your superheroes unhappy and you can forgive a picture that runs half an hour too long. It is the most grown-up film Marvel has made, and it is carried by two actors rather than by the plot. Gleiberman's verdict was that the film is "more busy and self-serious than it is emotionally involving." He was close. The picture is busy. The emotion is real, and it arrives about a reel too late.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Spider-Man is sent after the mind controller and fights the possessed people she jumps into, one of them a grandmother whose face is the face of Aunt May. The hospital sequence and the skyscraper fight with Hulk happen in the middle of the picture, and Peter comes out of both of them changed and in pain.

The truth about the villain arrives late. Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) is not the mastermind. She is attacking Damage Control because the organization experimented on her sister, who had the same powers and died in their lab. Peter stops trying to stop her, and instead lets her into his mind, where she finds Aunt May's recorded advice about power and responsibility. Jean's own power then goes off the scale, and Peter takes a bullet meant for her. She gets inside his head and keeps him alive until the doctors can.

He recovers, and he is back on the street, and MJ and Ned are at his side again. He and MJ are not together, because she does not remember what they had. In the last beat before the credits, Ned and Peter do their old secret handshake, and the implication is that Ned's memories of Peter are coming back.

Jean leaves. Her final scene is a bus out of New York, with no stated destination.

The post-credits scene is the tracking app Ned wrote, back on a phone screen. It flags another Spider-Man sighting, and the map pulls back from the city, out of the country, off the planet, into space. Nothing is said. It is aimed at Avengers: Secret Wars.