'If People Get Mad I Can't Control That': Inside The Making Of Spider-Man: Brand New Day

The MCU has had its ups and downs since Avengers: Endgame, but Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was an undisputed high point. It seemed inevitable that its director, Destin Daniel Cretton, would return with another Marvel project — and after a year attached to the never-made Avengers: Kang Dynasty, he is back with two: the Disney+ series Wonder Man and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth Tom Holland Spidey film.

Brand New Day picks up from No Way Home, which ended with all memory of Peter Parker erased by a magic spell. He is an isolated adult now, with no life beyond his crime-fighting, while MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) get on with lives that no longer include him. "He's at a place where he feels like it's his duty to be alone and to work," Cretton says.

The film brings in the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and stars Sadie Sink as a still-undisclosed character that many fans suspect is Jean Grey. Cretton stays coy, but he is effusive about the actor: he first worked with Sink on The Glass Castle when she was 14, and after seeing her in John Proctor Is the Villain on Broadway he was "bawling my eyes out at the end of that show." Her performance here, he promises, is "unbelievable."

On Tramell Tillman's Damage Control chief — a character with comics ties to mutants — Cretton laughs off the spoiler question. "He is the perfect actor to play someone who is perhaps hiding levels."

He is blunter about the film's opening villain montage, which shows Spider-Man cleaning up the city across the four years his friends spent at school. "Montages suck! Every shot is not just a new setup, it's a new location." The fun, he says, came from choosing comic covers that let the team imagine what happened just before or after the frames everyone knows.

As for the title, Holland hinted it pays off in the final frame. Cretton agrees it reflects where Peter lands: "The journey of this movie is about searching for that feeling of a brand-new day. I don't think he really has that feeling in the beginning."

Asked why some superhero movies work and others fail, his answer is thematic rather than tactical: the ones he connects with have something at their core that is clearly personal to the director. That is also his approach to the Naruto movie he is developing — a story about "having an ugliness or a monster or some part of you that you're ashamed of, and then coming to realize that's the part that makes you unique." And yes, Shang-Chi 2 is still in development: "I also would love to see Shang-Chi 2!"