Tom Holland’s Spider-Man saves NYC and battles the Hulk in “Brand New Day.” Yet the movie is also a coming-of-age story about a young man dealing with change.
Tom Holland’s superhero in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is really great at his job but his personal life is at a low point. He grows distant from his friends and watches them live their lives over social media. He’s also going through some things physically and is feeling quite out of place.
It sounds a lot like what many people experience after their teen years. (Outside of battling the Hulk, of course.) And that’s why director Destin Daniel Cretton (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) feels his latest Marvel movie (in theaters now) taps into something quite universal: how to deal with major life transitions.
“To me, it was always Peter Parker’s ultimate coming-of-age story,” Cretton says of Spidey’s unmasked alter ego. “It’s that time when real life just smacks you in the face and what you thought was so easy to understand, the difference between right and wrong and good and bad, suddenly becomes very gray. You feel real loss for the first time, real tragedy for the first time, real loneliness for the first time.
“It is about adulthood,” the filmmaker adds. “The answer to how you survive these major transitions is the other theme of the movie: learning to lean on the people around you who help keep your feet on the ground.”
The previous three “Spider-Man” movies followed Peter’s high school years growing up in Queens with girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best pal Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) while also fighting supervillains solo and beside the Avengers. The ending of 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” however, left our hero in quite a pickle: A magic spell to solve a multiverse crisis made the world forget Peter, including MJ and Ned.
Cretton points to a few times in his own life after leaving college – “going through a breakup, not having a job, feeling like I’m just floating in the wind” – where “the brain can really trick you into thinking that you’re the only person on the planet who’s going through these types of emotions,” he says. The fact that “literally nobody knows who he is was to me a relatable place to start this character.”
An early scene in “Brand New Day” shows Peter’s personal plight: He gets a key to the city as Spider-Man for all his everyday derring-do, and he’s seen twirling the key, alone, while doing laundry. When MJ and Ned move back to New York City as roommates after graduating from MIT, Peter quietly crashes their housewarming party. He sees Ned is still obsessed with Spider-Man, hatching a Spidey tracker app, and that MJ has moved on with a new boyfriend.
Anyone who’s ever run into a person they knew in high school who didn’t remember them probably relates to Peter’s pain. “There’s no worse feeling than feeling unseen,” Cretton says. “Everybody feels like that, even just throughout the day – even somebody who clearly knows who you are, it’s still easy to feel unseen by people.”
Complicating matters even further for Peter, in addition to a mysterious new supervillain who confounds him, is the fact that his body’s changing. The arachnid DNA is starting to evolve and overtake his human side, presenting as an overloading of his super-senses, blackouts that result in him waking up in weird web structures, and a general feeling of being out of sorts with his abilities.
Cretton utilized elements of body horror to viscerally depict Peter’s troubles and leaned on his own influences. “‘Teen Wolf’ was like my jam when I was young,” he says. “There’s no better way to tell the story of growing up than with physical changes that you can’t control, that make you feel like a monster.
“In many ways, Peter is fighting change in this movie. He is trying to control his life, you know? And part of his journey is learning to accept that change is inevitable.”
There’s a strong emphasis overall on mental health in “Brand New Day,” which is reflective of a new theme in Marvel movies: Last year’s “Thunderbolts” also tackled loneliness, as well as trauma and depression.
“I love watching these big, spectacular movies when there’s something about it that really relates to me and my personal experience,” Cretton says. “I don’t know if that’s going to become a fad, but I do hope that continues.”