Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
If you're scared of heights, you won't envy Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Spider-Man. At the end of "Spider-Man: No Way Home" (2021), Doctor Strange cast a spell erasing the entire world's memory of Peter Parker to keep the people he loves safe: MJ (Zendaya), his one-time girlfriend, and everyone else who once knew him personally, no longer remember he exists. Spider-Man himself is still a celebrated fixture of the city, out swinging over Manhattan and saving people daily. What's gone is Peter, the person underneath the mask. That split, adored by the city, invisible to everyone who used to love him, gives the film a solid emotional thread to work from, even when the plot around it doesn't always earn the feeling.
The action mostly delivers. Several set pieces are well staged, with visual effects work that makes the rooftop chases and mid-air catches feel physically dangerous rather than weightless, though a couple of the later sequences blur together and lean on scale more than they need to.
Holland handles the material well, letting the performance sit in real discomfort rather than smoothing it into easy heroics. Ned (Jacob Batalon) is the film's reliable scene-stealer, and every one of his beats lands the way the franchise has trained audiences to expect since "Spider-Man: Homecoming" (2017).
None of this makes the plot especially plausible, and the film knows it, moving fast enough that you don't usually stop to poke holes in it. At two and a half hours, though, it pushes its welcome further than the story needs; a tighter cut closer to 100 minutes would have kept the momentum without losing anything that works.
Nevertheless, it's a well done film that fills a couple of hours with fun entertainment where the story treats its heightened dangers as entirely real, and lets you go along with that instead of thinking about the actual war unfolding in reality right now.
"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" opens in theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026.
