Don’t screw this up, Marvel

Despite Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s success, the MCU is on shaky ground.

Despite Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s success, the MCU is on shaky ground.

In less than a week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day raked in $1 billion worldwide and had the biggest box office opening weekend in Hollywood history . The feature has been a reminder of why Sony is probably never going to give up the Spider-Man film rights, and highlighted how Marvel Studios was smart to strike a deal to bring the character into its own films . But as successful as Brand New Day has been, the larger MCU has been stuck in a confounding slump for the past few years. And while this latest Spider-Man movie was truly excellent, it’s not necessarily a sign that Marvel has figured out how to get things back on track.

Though Brand New Day ’s current box office is undeniably impressive, it’s not exactly surprising when you take a beat to remember how consistently well Sony and Marvel’s recent live-action Spider-Man projects have performed in the past. Both Spider-Man: Homecoming and No Way Home cleared the $100 million mark during their opening weekends, and it only took Far From Home six days to pull in $185 million . What’s different here is how quickly Brand New Day has shattered records and cemented itself as one of Marvel and Sony’s most fruitful collaborations.

The film’s a testament to the fact that people do still have an appetite for big-screen comic book spectacle when the stars align just right. But the things that make this latest Spider-Man project work so well haven’t been present in the Sony-free parts of Marvel’s interconnected universe.

Editor’s note: This post contains Spider-Man: Brand New Day spoilers .

Even though Jon Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy eventually started mucking around in the multiverse, those films told relatively self-contained stories that were focused on building a grounded world around Tom Holland’s Peter Parker. Taking that approach highlighted the character’s evolution as a solo hero and made it interesting whenever he got roped into situations with the Avengers.

Brand New Day feels like director Destin Daniel Cretton and cowriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers striking a strong balance between Sony’s solo Spider-Man movies and Marvel’s larger crossover events. There are a handful of classic Spider-Man rogues in the mix, like John Bernthal’s Punisher and Michael Mando’s Scorpion, who get their fair share of bombastic action sequences. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is running around too, but Brand New Day ’s story is really about Peter dealing with the emotional consequences of erasing himself from the world’s memory.

As ridiculous as that all might sound (especially to non-comics fans), they’re details that Sony and Marvel’s previous Spider-Man collaborations laid the groundwork for. You could watch Watts’ trilogy and go into Brand New Day mostly understanding what’s at stake and how characters got to where they are emotionally. The MCU has struggled to maintain that kind of narrative cohesion during its sprawling Multiverse Saga, which began with WandaVision and will end with Avengers: Secret Wars . Marvel has been trying to keep far more plates spinning with its shared universe of films and series compared to Sony, which just pumped the brakes on making Spider-Man spinoff movies . But the mixed reactions to trailers for the studio’s next big feature makes it seem like people might not exactly be excited about what’s coming next.

Avengers: Doomsday will bring most of Marvel’s heroes together once again to fight a version of Doctor Doom portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. The movie will probably use the multiverse to explain why Doctor Doom looks exactly like Iron Man, and it will definitely bring a handful of the live-action 20th Century Studios X-Men to the MCU. Marvel is clearly using Doomsday and next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars to put a period on the Multiverse Saga and start fresh after years of the franchise being too unwieldy.

The films and Downey Jr.’s rehiring are also Marvel’s way of moving on from the Kang-filled future Marvel gave up on after jettisoning Jonathan Majors . Kevin Feige has been open about new iterations of the X-Men being key to Marvel’s plans for the future. But if the studio wants audiences to really become invested in Charles Xavier and his students, it would do well to lean into some of Brand New Day ’s strongest beats.

Rather than introducing Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey as a charming telepath, Brand New Day presents the character as a teenager willing to destroy anyone who gets in her way as she searches for her sister. Both of the Greys are mutants with natural abilities that make them dangerous, but what pushes Jean to deadly violence is the way the government is hunting them down in hopes of weaponizing them. By framing Jean as one of its villains, Brand New Day both keeps its story relatively grounded and gives you a way of understanding how the MCU is touching on classic elements of X-Men comics lore. Jean might not want to hurt innocent people, but she does in a very public way, and it’s easy to imagine her actions becoming the basis for human-mutant tensions going forward.

Brand New Day ’s ability to tap into those ideas without feeling like a stealth X-Men movie is one of the more impressive things about it. And now that Spider-Man has given us a promising taste of the MCU’s new mutants, Marvel has a chance to keep audiences hooked if it doesn’t drop the ball like Fox .