The MCU is over.
People are tired of superheroes.
Spider-Man ran out of things to say after Raimi.
All true. And yet Spider-Man never wears thin, and Brand New Day has just recorded the second-biggest opening in cinema history.
Mind you, though: the question is not why it worked, but why Spider-Man always works.
An immortal hero
On its opening day in North America, the film grossed 168 million dollars. More than Avengers: Endgame. Worldwide opening weekend: 927 million. The second-best result OF ALL TIME. In Italy alone, the box office reached 15.9 million in the first five days: once again, the second-best opening ever for a superhero film. All without IMAX screens, taken up by Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Over the past five years Marvel has racked up a long series of underperforming titles, met with a cool reception. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, however, has won everyone over: CinemaScore, favourable reviews, audiences.
Credit goes to an immortal hero who is showing the major American studios an uncomfortable truth, but one worth hearing. Audiences are not tired of heroes. They are tired of heroes they cannot, will not or simply are unable to genuinely empathise with.
The only superhero who asks you to worry about him
Because, let’s be honest: Spider-Man is the only Marvel superhero (and has been since the ’60s) whom audiences cannot perceive as invulnerable. Thor is a god. Iron Man is a billionaire. Captain America was engineered in a laboratory to be perfect. Peter Parker is none of these. He is just a kid from the outskirts who struggles to make ends meet and who, however hard he tries, cannot turn up to an appointment on time.
Brand New Day not only leaves this leitmotif intact, it amplifies it, showing an even more vulnerable Peter: alone, lost; caught between two ages, no longer a boy but not yet a man. Now without friends or identity.
That is also why (here, as always), his problems, however cosmic, are personal first and foremost. Existential. Courage. Growing up. The importance of letting go. In Brand New Day all of this becomes a highly accomplished story about identity and loneliness. No galactic monsters, no supervillains. Human questions at the centre.
Quite a difference.
The reset as a tool of franchise governance
Loosely inspired by the “Brand New Day” and “Evolve or Die” storylines, Brand New Day sends an explicit signal to audiences. As if to say: “We’re starting again. But more grown-up.”
Tom Holland has worn the Spider-Man mask since 2016. Brand New Day is his fourth film in the role. And yet, thanks to this film and the narrative mechanism underpinning the script, even in a landscape where franchises are rewritten every three or four years, Holland’s saga looks unshakeable and is poised to become the new multimedia benchmark for Spider-Man. Surpassing even the Raimi trilogy.
The world around him has been cleared of accumulated complexity. Emotional continuity will survive the reset of narrative continuity. Everything will change, except Tom Holland and the tone the previous films have always had.
Another ten years of this Spider-Man
The MCU has struggled in recent years not because the films were technically flawed. It struggled because it had diluted the character of its heroes in a narrative complexity that demanded too much work from audiences. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not a perfect film, admittedly. But it is a simple film, enjoyable to watch, that manages to bring in characters from other franchises (Hulk and Punisher above all) without requiring you to have seen past films or Disney+ exclusives.
927 million in a weekend is the result of these choices: simple, but brave. And our hope is that Tom Holland and these screenwriters can repeat these well-deserved successes for at least another ten years.
New Connections (FAQ)
Why have other Marvel films struggled in recent years while Spider-Man keeps working?
The main difference lies in the emotional scale of the stories. Many recent MCU films asked audiences to worry about the entire multiverse, the survival of parallel universes, narrative structures that required knowledge of ten previous films. Spider-Man asks audiences to worry about Peter Parker. Cosmic stakes do not trigger empathy the way personal stakes do. The brain responds to specific people, not to concepts. Peter is a specific person audiences have known for ten years.
Can other franchises replicate the success of Brand New Day?
The structure is replicable: a reset of context that preserves character, continuity of the lead actor over time, a human emotional scale instead of a cosmic one. The difficulty is that this kind of construction demands years of consistency that many franchises have not had. You cannot replicate the result of Brand New Day in two films: you replicate the strategy and wait ten years. Most franchises lack the patience or the discipline to do so.
What does the Spider-Man case teach organisations that manage brands with a long history?
That complexity accumulated over time is a burden that requires active management. Franchises, like brands, accumulate history, expectations and contradictions. Ignoring them creates a sense of inconsistency. Erasing them creates a sense of betrayal. Brand New Day’s solution, resetting the context while preserving the character, is one of the most elegant answers to this problem that cinema has produced in recent years. For a brand, the equivalent question is: what is essential to our character and cannot be touched? And what has built up over time and can be reset without losing our identity?
BLISS®
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