I
t's been five years since Spider-Man: No Way Home closed out with Peter Parker erased from everyone's memory, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day picks up more or less where that left him alone, mostly friendless, trying to figure out who he is when nobody around him remembers who he used to be.
Destin Daniel Cretton directs this one, a step away from the Jon Watts trilogy, and the reviews that landed this week make it pretty clear the change in hands split people right down the middle.
On the positive end, there's a lot of noise.
Rediff called it the best MCU Spider-Man movie yet. NDTV and Scroll. in were similarly warm, and USA Today apparently described Holland's performance as his most emotionally gripping work in the role so far.
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw liked it too, though he framed the film's tonal shift as something closer to "semi-Cronenberg-style" than typical Marvel fare, which is a strange sentence to type about a Spider-Man movie and also kind of makes you want to see it more.
Then there's the other camp. IndieWire's David Ehrlich wasn't having it, calling the film a squandered opportunity for a genuine reset dull, he said, and downbeat in a way that doesn't earn its own mood.
Variety ran two reviews that more or less argue with each other: one praising the film's refusal to lean on multiverse gimmicks, the other, from Owen Gleiberman, admitting the action mostly works while still landing on the verdict that the whole thing is trying too hard.
Rotten Tomatoes has settled somewhere in the high 80s to low 90s depending which day you check the aggregate, which for what it's worth is technically the lowest score of any Holland-era Spider-Man film still a strong number, just not spotless the way the earlier three were.
Box office tracking has been almost comically inconsistent all week.
Deadline had the domestic opening as low as $180-190 million back in early July. By Tuesday, after the review embargo lifted, that number had crept up toward $195 million from some trackers and as high as $274 million from others.
Box Office Pro, meanwhile, published a range of $230-250 million and floated the idea probably more hope than forecast that this could end up the second-biggest domestic opening of all time, trailing only No Way Home's $260.1 million from 2021.
Globally, the spread gets even wider. Some outlets are throwing around $425 million as an opening weekend figure. Others are confidently predicting $800 million.
Whatever the real number turns out to be, it's opening into a fairly stacked late-July frame, going up against Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which is still holding decent numbers of its own and, oddly enough, shares two of its leads with this film, since Holland and Zendaya (married since sometime last year, per most entertainment coverage) both appear in that one too.
Locally, this is shaping up to be enormous. Advance bookings alone crossed 5.8 lakh tickets across national chains for day one. PVR INOX reportedly handed the film roughly 70% of its total showtimes, which is the kind of allocation usually reserved for something studios are betting the quarter on.
Early estimates out of the Indian trade press had Brand New Day opening somewhere around Rs 45 crore domestically, with some outlets suggesting it could challenge Avengers: Endgame's India opening-day record if word of mouth holds through the weekend.
Holland, for his part, has already admitted this cut of the film isn't the one that first came together in the edit room. In a clip making the rounds online, he said an earlier version simply didn't work, even though it was closer to what test audiences seemed to want.
The version that finally released, he said, wasn't quite what the creative team was after.
Which, depending on your read of the reviews above, either explains a lot or doesn't explain anything at all.
Either way, it's out now, and the theaters seem to be betting big on it whatever the critics end up deciding once the initial wave of reactions settles down.
