Spider-Man: Brand New Day: What Brookings Should Know Now That the Summer Dust Has Settled

By the time the leaves turn along Sixth Street and the wind picks up off the prairie, the superhero movies of summer tend to fade from conversation around Brookings. But “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is worth circling back to this October, now that the initial box-office noise has quieted and the film has had time to settle into its actual reputation rather than its opening-weekend hype. For a town where Marvel movies reliably pull families and college students alike into Brookings Cinema 8, that's exactly the kind of title that deserves a second look once the dust clears, especially with $5 Tuesdays making it an easy, low-stakes way to catch up on something you might have skipped back in July.

The real story behind “Brand New Day” isn't really about web-slinging, though. It's about a franchise trying to figure out what comes after “No Way Home,” a film so stuffed with multiversal nostalgia and fan service that it practically dared its successor to feel smaller by comparison. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, best known for character-driven work like “Short Term 12” before he moved into the MCU with “Shang-Chi,” was a curious choice to follow that spectacle, and it shows in the final product: this is a Spider-Man movie more interested in Peter Parker's exhaustion than in multiverse pyrotechnics. Writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, veterans of the Holland-era Spider-Man films, clearly understood the assignment was to scale back the universe-hopping and scale up the emotional stakes for a guy who has quite literally lost his support system.

The premise picks up with Peter Parker essentially starting over, alone, grinding away at protecting New York without the safety net of Doctor Strange's magic or an army of allies. The personal toll of that isolation starts to physically change him, his powers evolving in ways that feel less like an upgrade and more like a symptom, while a new telepathic antagonist circles in the background. Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Florence Pugh, Marisa Tomei, and Mark Ruffalo round out a cast that gives the film more dramatic ballast than the trailers suggested, and Sadie Sink joins as a new presence worth watching.

Here's where it's worth being straight with you: the reception has been genuinely strong, not just hype-machine strong. Rotten Tomatoes has the film sitting at a 90% Tomatometer, which is about as good as this franchise has scored in the Holland era, and its average rating of 7.6 out of 10 backs that up rather than undercutting it. That's not a case of critics loving the spectacle while quietly souring on the substance; the numbers agree with each other, which is rarer than you'd think for a 38th MCU entry.

Having sat with it, my honest take is this: “Brand New Day” earns its praise, and it's the best pure Spider-Man film since “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” It trades scale for intimacy in a way that mostly pays off, Holland does some of his most grounded work in the role, and Cretton's instinct for character over chaos gives the film a weight the last two Spider-Man outings didn't bother chasing. It isn't flawless, a couple of mid-film stretches sag under the telepathic villain's underdeveloped motivations, but the emotional core holds, and that's what sticks with you walking out. If you're the type who usually waits for the big tentpole movies to show up at Brookings Cinema 8's expanded-legroom seating, this is the one from this summer's crop actually worth that extra legroom.

Facts verified as of October 7, 2026.