A Superhero Film That Actually Made Us Cry
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now, and the conversation around it has moved well past trailers and press tour moments. The sequel to Spider-Man: No Way Home arrives with a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that reflects critical consensus rather than hype – and after sitting with it, that score feels earned. Tom Holland and Zendaya have been working the press circuit hard for this one, and the film gives them material worth promoting.
What separates Brand New Day from the typical superhero release is its register. This is a quieter, more grounded story about Peter Parker attempting to live in solitude – less about saving the world, more about what it costs to disconnect from the people who matter to you. FashionDailyMag writers Angeline Barion, Bernice Corral, and Rachel Choy caught it opening weekend and came out with thoughts, tears, and some very specific observations about Tom Holland’s wardrobe choices.
What the Film Is Actually About
Strip away the action sequences and Brand New Day is genuinely interested in interiority – what makes a person distinct, how isolation unravels identity, and why human connection functions less like a luxury and more like a survival mechanism. The film’s emotional throughline is strong enough that Rachel Choy put it plainly: it will make you want to call your best friend. That’s not a small thing to accomplish inside a Sony superhero franchise.
The tissue count tells you something. Angeline Barion arrived prepared – a 60-count packet of Kleenex tissues, shared across three seats in the same row. Between Barion, Corral, and Choy, they worked through approximately 20 of them, enough to fill a plastic cup. These are three self-described Spider-Man fans who came in emotionally invested, but the film still found ways to get to them that they didn’t anticipate going in.
Barion put her anticipation for this film on par with her feelings about Minions, describing the overlap in release timing as an “out of body experience” – something close to spontaneous combustion, in her words. Corral called it her most anticipated film of the year. That level of pre-existing investment can work against a movie, raising the bar until almost nothing clears it. Brand New Day apparently cleared it.
The Performances, Ranked by Emotional Impact
Sadie Sink joins Holland and Zendaya in the principal cast, and all three drew attention from the reviewers. Holland, specifically, sparked a debate that managed to be both sincere and ridiculous: did he need to be shirtless as frequently as the film required? Corral’s answer was essentially no. Choy’s answer was no, followed immediately by yes. The film does include a particular scene involving Holland’s character gaining organic web-shooting ability that generated strong reactions – described by Choy as visually striking in a way that landed somewhere between visceral and absurd.
Zendaya’s performance carries weight here, particularly given the film’s central theme about connection and what gets sacrificed when someone chooses isolation. The press tour she and Holland have run together adds a layer of meta-awareness to watching them onscreen – two people who are also a real couple, playing characters whose relationship is under strain. Whether that knowledge enriches the viewing experience or complicates it depends entirely on the audience member.
Why This One Feels Different
Sony’s Spider-Man films have operated in an interesting space – attached to the Marvel universe but distinct from it, carrying their own continuity and emotional logic. Brand New Day leans into that separateness. Where No Way Home was built around spectacle and nostalgia, this follow-up uses a smaller frame. Peter Parker in solitude is a different kind of story than Peter Parker saving the multiverse.
The 91% Rotten Tomatoes score places it among the better-reviewed entries in the Spider-Man franchise. For context, that kind of critical alignment usually signals that a film is doing something beyond genre mechanics – that it has a point of view, a mood, a reason to exist beyond the next installment.
What Barion, Corral, and Choy kept returning to was the emotional logic of the film’s core argument: that relationships are not peripheral to who you are, they are constitutive of it. The film makes that case without being heavy-handed about it, which is harder than it sounds when you’re working inside a genre that defaults to punching and explosions. Brand New Day earns its quieter moments by building toward them – the payoffs hit because the groundwork is there.
Choy’s mention of organic web acquisition drew the most animated response from the group, landing as the kind of scene that would be entirely at home in a completely different type of film. It is, by all accounts, quite something. Twenty tissues, one plastic cup, and that particular scene – Brand New Day is apparently full of surprises, and not all of them are the kind you see coming from the trailer.
Angeline Barion almost spontaneously combusted waiting for this film. The question now is whether anyone who wasn’t already a fan walks out of the theater feeling the same way.
