Sometimes You Gotta Get Mad: The Real Villain in Spider-Man: Brand New Day Is Rage

This is an IGN opinion piece from Roth Cornet, who has spent over a decade covering Hollywood, franchise filmmaking, and the business of entertainment. She's covered superhero movies so deeply, she even made a five-part audio documentary about Superman. Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day follow. Bruce Banner once said the secret to controlling The Hulk is that he's "always angry." But in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Banner is doing his best to bury the big green guy altogether rather than be in a constant, manageable simmer. But by the end of the movie, Peter Parker learns that it's not about never being angry, or always being angry. The trick is when and how we let that anger out. On its face, Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s villainous organization, Damage Control (DODC), which was founded by Tony Stark and the government post-Avengers and later went rogue, could be construed as a disappointing cipher. For the most part, it’s a faceless entity with no emotional engine. Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) provides a central character to represent the agency, but he’s given little screen time or character development. We never really connect to Metzger’s felt motivations, so the stakes for