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Tom Holland's Spider-Man needs to evolve - or quit
Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest instalment, is going to be a mega-hit. But Holland's incarnation is running out of web and needs to grow up – or hand over to a younger actor
The latest Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is expected to have the biggest opening weekend of any cinema release of 2026 so far. It could well go on to be the most lucrative blockbuster of the year. The franchise's previous instalment, Spider-Man: No Way Home, was a near $2bn (£1.5bn) hit which was the highest grossing film of 2021. And since then, fans have only grown fonder of its stars, Tom Holland and Zendaya, whose real-life romance seems to inspire more fervent fascination than any of the characters they play on screen.
Then there's the film itself, which is a well-crafted, action-packed addition to the colossally popular series. In some ways, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a gift to aficionados of the Marvel superhero universe, boasting as it does such nerd-friendly treats as a fight between Spidey and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), an unlikely team-up with the Punisher (Jon Bernthal, goofier and less scary than in his Disney+ small-screen incarnation), and all sorts of lore which I won't reveal here.
But at the same time Brand New Day could well leave fans with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction – a sense that Holland's Peter Parker / Spider-Man may be running out of web.
In the half decade since the last film came out, time has moved on for the characters, too. Spider-Man has done so much crime fighting that New Yorkers now adore him. (Arch Spidey-sceptic J Jonah Jameson is nowhere to be seen.) Meanwhile, his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) and his beloved once-girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) have both graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The snag is that due to some magic-related shenanigans in No Way Home, MJ and Ned have had their memories of Peter erased. Not only have they forgotten that he's Spider-Man, they've forgotten that he exists.
No Way Home finished with the promise that Peter would explain to them what had happened, but in Brand New Day we learn that he decided against it. For the sake of their safety, he has kept away from his friends, and now lives alone in a dusty attic, with only his voice-activated computer for company. What this means is that rather than developing the Peter-MJ relationship, the franchise has effectively scrapped it, so that when the star-crossed lovers bump into each other, Holland can do his tongue-tied, lovelorn geek act all over again.
It's the kind of thing that happens regularly in superhero comics: if a series has been published for several decades, as Spider-Man has, then periodic resets are a necessity. But superheroes in films can sometimes mature and change as the actors get older. That's one of the reasons why so many people were invested in Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark / Iron Man and Chris Evans's Steve Rogers / Captain America. Peter hasn't done that. Holland has now starred in four Spider-Man films (not counting his appearances in various Captain America and Avengers adventures), but his closest relationships are essentially back where they started.
It's the same with other aspects of the character. One plot strand in Brand New Day is that Peter is mutating into a more powerful and more spidery superhuman – a conceit with spine-tingling echoes of David Cronenberg's body-horror classic, The Fly. This strand takes up an inordinate amount of time, and prompts endless technobabble about a mutation-repressing "inhibitor". But, again, it doesn't result in any major shifts in the character or his world. Without wishing to spoil anything, Peter doesn't turn into an eight-legged, eight-eyed monster.
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The director, Destin Daniel Cretton, and screenwriters, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, haven't worked out how to take their web-slinging hero anywhere new, which is ironic for a film with "New" in the subtitle. In two-and-a-half hours, Peter doesn't do anything that couldn't have been dealt with in a five-minute pre-credit sequence.
In the next film – and there will be a next film before long – maybe the team will have the courage to let the characters grow up and move on. Maybe we'll get to see an older Peter Parker with a job and a family. Holland is 30 now, after all. If his Spider-Man isn't allowed to evolve, then he should probably hang up the red and blue costume and let a younger actor have a turn.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is released in cinemas internationally on 31 July.
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Source: BBC
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