I’ve seen this movie twice now, and that’s the first thing you should probably know, because it’s the thing that surprised me the most. I don’t do that often. I usually see a movie, form my take, and move on to the next one. But Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of those rare films where I walked out of the theater already thinking about when I was going to go back.
I just got IMAX tickets today, because the IMAX screenings finally opened up. I’m considering Dolby 3D. And I’m still hunting for a ScreenX showing, which I’ll get into, because that’s actually a much bigger story than it sounds like.
Let’s Talk About the Box Office
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened at $360 million domestically, and that is the biggest domestic opening weekend in history. It passed Avengers: Endgame, which had $357.1 million, and that’s a record I honestly figured was going to sit there forever.
Worldwide, it pulled $932 million in its opening weekend, which makes it the second biggest global opening of all time behind Endgame‘s $1.223 billion.
I do want to be clear about what these numbers actually are, because opening weekend records and all-time box office records are two very different things. Endgame is still sitting at around $2.79 billion lifetime. Brand New Day has a long way to climb before it’s anywhere near that conversation. But the opening itself is genuinely historic, and the part that impresses me the most isn’t the number. It’s how it happened.
It did all of that without IMAX.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey had exclusive rights to IMAX screens in North America for three weekends, which meant Sony was locked out of the biggest premium format in the business during the exact window when a Spider-Man movie needs it most. And The Odyssey wasn’t slowing down either. That film has cleared $911 million after three weekends, and it still took second place this weekend with $51 million. So this wasn’t a case of Spider-Man having the box office to itself. Two enormous movies were running at the same time, and one of them had the premium screens.
Sony broke the domestic opening record anyway.
The ScreenX Thing, Which I Think Is the Real Story Here
Here’s how they got around it, and I think this is the most interesting industry story of the summer.
Sony and CJ 4DPLEX created something called “Shot for ScreenX,” and Brand New Day is the first film in history that was actually shot for the format. That means a second unit was on set during production capturing the footage that plays on the side walls, instead of taking the finished movie and stretching the image out digitally in post. Destin Daniel Cretton has talked about the ScreenX team physically being there on set to shoot those wings.
That’s the IMAX playbook, applied to a format that has spent years being treated as a novelty upcharge on your ticket.
Think about what actually happened there. Nolan spends a decade turning IMAX into a real filmmaker’s format, shoots The Odyssey entirely on IMAX cameras, and locks up the screens. Sony can’t compete on that ground, so instead of just eating the loss, they went and built a rival premium format from the ground up and made their movie the first native release in it.
That’s not a marketing gimmick to me. That’s a studio getting squeezed and responding by creating a new category. And if “Shot for ScreenX” catches on with other filmmakers—and CJ 4DPLEX has said they’re already working with other studios on it—this is going to be the movie that started it.
IMAX has now confirmed that Brand New Day is coming to their screens as The Odyssey‘s exclusivity window closes, and the two films are going to share digital IMAX locations across America. I bought tickets the moment I saw the announcement. I know it’s not true IMAX 70mm, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I still found myself thinking I have to go see this in IMAX, partly to support the movie, and partly because I just want to be in that room again.
The Video Game Thing
Okay, so this is the take that I think a lot of gamers can relate to.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day plays like a video game and feels like Marvel’s first video game adaptation.
It is not officially adapting Insomniac’s Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2. But I sat in that theater for two hours and twenty-five minutes, and I could not stop thinking about those games. Not for a single stretch of the movie. The entire time I was going, “I did that move in this game,” or “I know this reference, I’ve seen this before.”
The way Peter interacts with the police. The traversal. The rhythm of the fights. Even the little things, like the apparel, which is pulled almost directly out of the game in ways that are not subtle at all. If you’ve put twenty hours into those games, you’re going to feel it constantly.
And I mean all of that as a compliment.
Here’s why. Outside of the comics, I think the Insomniac Spider-Man games told the most emotional and the strongest stories in all of modern Spider-Man entertainment. Not only the best action, but yes, the best stories as well. And a big part of that is that those games had twenty-plus hours to build out an expansive world, let the characters breathe, and actually earn their emotional beats. That’s a structural advantage a two-hour movie should never be able to compete with.
Somehow, Brand New Day does the exact same thing in 145 minutes, and I still don’t fully understand how.
Tom Holland has said he was in the writers’ room on this one, and I believe him, because you can feel it in the movie. If you’ve been following his interviews the way I have, he brings up the PlayStation 5 Spider-Man 2 game constantly. He’s an actual gamer. He knows this character. And more than that, he listens to the people who love this character, which is not something you can say about everybody who’s played a comic book role.
So if this ever crosses his feed, I’ll just say this much: Adapt Spider-Man 2. And keep an eye on whatever Insomniac ends up doing with Spider-Man 3.
I also really hope Insomniac Games gets the credit here. You can argue the influence went both directions—that the movies inspired the games and the games inspired the movies—and honestly, the synergy between them is one of the coolest things about all of this. But the DNA of those games is on that screen, and Insomniac built something that genuinely changed how this character moves and feels. A record-breaking movie is now running on that foundation, and I think that deserves to be said out loud.
Is the Movie Overstuffed?
For me personally, the answer is no, and I went in fully expecting it to be.
I felt like I enjoyed every single cast member, and if anything, my complaint runs the other way, because I just wanted more of some of them. If I had to say who this movie is really about, it’s Spider-Man and Punisher. Everything else orbits around those two.
The Hulk material that you saw in the trailer is in there, but it’s a smaller presence than the marketing led me to expect. Ned and MJ are also in it a surprisingly small amount. But none of that is a bad thing. If anything, less is more here. I was happy every time they showed up on screen, and that’s exactly the reaction you want out of an ensemble movie and almost never actually get.
What I appreciated the most is that this movie actually deals with the fallout of No Way Home. Peter is living in a world that doesn’t remember him, and that’s the kind of premise a lot of movies would nod at in the first ten minutes and then quietly walk away from. This one doesn’t. There are real consequences, and it sits in them.
Going into it, I was wondering whether they were going to handle that or dodge it. They handled it, and they handled it well, and I think moving forward the relationships between Peter, MJ, and Ned are going to flourish again in a way that actually feels earned instead of reset.
The MCU Connection, and That Post-Credits Scene
Going into this movie, one of the things I was thinking about most was how connected it was going to be to Doomsday and Secret Wars. Were we going to get a Doctor Doom cameo? Some kind of big setup?
The answer is no, and I think that’s one of the best decisions the movie makes. It’s a really grounded, street-level film that’s confident enough to just be its own thing instead of spending its third act doing homework for the next movie.
The post-credits scene, though. I have to be absolutely honest with you: that is one of the most disappointing post-credits scenes in Marvel history. I felt like I wasted my time sitting there for it. Wait around at your own leisure, but I could have just watched a bad YouTube video about it and lost nothing.
That said, underneath the surface, this movie plants something significant. One of the most important elements of the MCU gets introduced here, and I genuinely think what happens in this film is going to have lasting effects that run through the entire phase after Secret Wars.
When I first saw it, I thought nobody was talking about this. I’ll own that I was wrong there, because three days into wide release everybody is talking about it. What I’ll say instead is that I don’t think people are weighing it correctly yet. There’s a difference between noticing that something happened and understanding what it’s going to cost down the line.
I’m doing a full breakdown and spoiler review of exactly what this means on the channel. Watch the video below, and if you enjoy the coverage, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next one!
Seeing It With a Crowd
Both times I saw this movie, the audience was completely locked in.
Not phones out, half paying attention. Actually engaged. Reacting, laughing, applauding. That communal thing that streaming can’t replicate and that people keep announcing is dead.
There was also a pop-up event at the Regal Irvine Spectrum where they gave away posters and shir
ts, plus a photo op with Spider-Man. I got the poster, I missed out on the shirts. All of that footage should be live on my channel right now.
I bring it up because the marketing and the promotion around this release has been a masterclass. Sony didn’t just sell a movie, they built an event around going to see one. I really hope future Marvel movies, and honestly future movies in general, take note of how effective that was, because I think this is going to set the standard for how comic book movies get released going forward.
Rankings, and My Recency Bias
I have to be upfront about something here.
Every time I watch a Spider-Man movie, I realize I have recency bias. I like the most recent Tom Holland Spider-Man movie every single time I see it. The same thing happened with Andrew Garfield, and I told people that at the time. So take everything that follows with that in mind.
Spider-Man isn’t my favorite Marvel character. He never has been. He’s great, and I love seeing him on the big screen, and I get excited every time one of his movies comes out. So for me to now say Spider-Man: Brand New Day is my favorite MCU movie is a big deal.
In terms of Spider-Man specifically, though, my personal favorites are still Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse. Nothing has touched those two for me.
But Brand New Day is now my favorite live-action Spider-Man movie, and I’m including every Sony live-action entry and every MCU Spider-Man film before it. Tom Holland is officially my favorite Spider-Man.
And here’s the part I genuinely did not expect to be typing: I think this might be one of my favorite live-action comic book movies of all time. That means it’s beating out Batman, and I am a crazy Batman fan. It’s beating out Deadpool. If it weren’t for the Spider-Verse movies, I would absolutely be calling this my favorite Spider-Man movie ever made.
I’m going to rewatch the entire franchise and do a proper ranking, because I want to make sure I’m not just riding the high off two viewings in a week. But the fact that I want to go back a third time, and I’m still chasing a ScreenX showing, and I bought IMAX tickets the same day they were announced, tells me something that the numbers can’t.
Where This Leaves Us
We’re four movies into this version of Spider-Man, and it somehow feels like the start of something new.
That’s the strangest and best thing about Brand New Day to me. Sony and Marvel essentially rebooted the Spider-Man franchise without having to recast Spider-Man. The title isn’t just a comics reference; it’s an accurate description of what the movie actually does.
Marvel is having a crazy year. Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jon Bernthal are all currently starring in two of the biggest movies in the world at the same time, which is an incredible thing to be able to say. Holland is Telemachus in The Odyssey, Zendaya is Athena, Bernthal is Menelaus. Then all three of them turn around and anchor the biggest domestic opening weekend ever recorded.
Doomsday is next, and I’m more excited for it than I’ve been for a Marvel movie in a long time.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now. See it in Dolby, see it in ScreenX, see it in IMAX. Just go see it with a crowd.
I’ll be there again.