Spider-Man swings back into town, and Brookings has had two months to catch up on the hype

By now, the arguments about “Brand New Day” have mostly settled into the usual places online, which means the people in Brookings and the surrounding towns who haven't gotten around to it yet are probably wondering if it's still worth the trip. Short answer: yes, and with autumn settling in around South Dakota, a two-hour-plus superhero movie with the heater running is exactly the kind of comfort-watch this time of year calls for. This isn't a hot-off-the-presses release anymore, it's late July's blockbuster drifting into the “wait, did everyone see this but me” phase, which is its own kind of worth-writing-about moment.

The real story behind “Brand New Day” isn't really about web-slinging at all. It's about what happens when a franchise that's been rebooted, re-cast, and multiverse-ed within an inch of its life tries to just... start over, cleanly, without the gimmick. No Doc Ock cameo, no three-Spider-Men stunt, no cross-dimensional fan service. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who made his name on smaller, character-driven work before Marvel handed him “Shang-Chi,” was brought in to do something trickier than a big action spectacle: make audiences care about Peter Parker as a guy again, not as a nostalgia delivery system. That's a tall order four films and five years after “No Way Home” rewired what people expect from this corner of the Marvel universe. Whether Cretton and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers pull it off is really the only question that matters here.

As for what actually happens: Peter Parker is on his own now, grinding it out as Spider-Man in New York with the kind of overwork that starts to wear a person down, superpowers included. That exhaustion ends up mattering more than you'd expect, because it's tangled up with his powers themselves starting to shift and change, right as something telepathic and unfriendly starts circling. Tom Holland anchors it, with Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Marisa Tomei and Mark Ruffalo rounding out familiar territory, while Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal, Florence Pugh and Tramell Tillman bring new energy into the mix. That's as far as the plot gets discussed here; the twists are the reason to go.

Now, the verdict. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at a strong 90%, which is the kind of number that tells you critics largely liked what Cretton was going for. But the site's average rating, 7.6 out of 10, tells a slightly more grounded story: this isn't a film critics are calling a masterpiece, it's one they genuinely enjoyed without losing their heads over it. That's actually a meaningful distinction, and a reassuring one. A 90% built on “pretty good, solidly done” reviews is more trustworthy than a 90% built on a handful of raves and some quiet dissent dragged along for the ride. It suggests consistency, which, four Spider-Man movies deep into this particular Tom Holland run, is not nothing.

My own take lines up with that reading. “Brand New Day” works best when it leans into Peter's exhaustion and lets the stakes feel personal rather than cosmic, and it stumbles a little whenever it remembers it's also required to deliver a Marvel-sized set piece. Florence Pugh and Tramell Tillman are a lot of fun in roles that feel genuinely new to this corner of the MCU, and Holland, five films and a decade into this character, still finds something sincere in Peter that keeps the whole thing from feeling like contractual obligation. It's not a film that reinvents the superhero genre. It is a film that remembers why people liked this version of Spider-Man in the first place, and that's a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.

If you're the type who likes catching this kind of big, effects-heavy studio picture on the largest screen available, Brookings Cinema 8 is the local home for that sort of thing, and with $5 tickets on Tuesdays, it's an easy, low-stakes way to finally close the loop on whatever you missed back in July.

Facts verified as of October 1, 2026.