Does Spider-Man Make the Most of His Brand New Day?

Since its marketing cycle started, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been talked up as a soft reboot in many respects. This is, as Tom Holland’s said, a Spider-Man film for the fans, made clear with a focus on talking up the practical work and taking Peter Parker out of the Avengers’ orbit to focus on him as a person. To watch this movie is like watching the end of the SpongeBob Squarepants episode “As Seen on TV,” where SpongeBob lets briefly cameoing in a Krusty Krab commercial go to his head and doesn’t do his job. Eventually, he’s pulled out of it by accidentally dropping burgers on the grill, with a crowd celebrating him for doing “what we’ve wanted all along!” You can easily see how this applies to Spider-Man: the Home trilogy, while commercially successful, has often felt like they were Spider-Man with several elements missing, either because they’d been repeated enough times to be meaningless, or because the writers seemingly weren’t interested in them. A cynical read of Brand New Day would be to dub it “apology media,” which exists mainly as a gesture of goodwill to assure fans the creators are back on track after a divisive (sometimes toxically so) previous entry. Scream 7, H