Spider-Man: Brand New Day has become a monster at the box office, but its success didn’t come from Marvel attempting to outdo the multiverse-sized spectacle of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
According to Kevin Feige, the goal from the beginning was to make Tom Holland’s fourth Spider-Man movie more personal, digging deeper into the characters instead of chasing an even larger event.
During a recent appearance at D23, the Marvel Studios president explained that the creative team understood there wasn’t much point in competing with the scale of No Way Home.
“When we made Brand New Day, we set out saying, ‘Well, we’ll never make more than No Way Home, never make it bigger than No Way Home. So, let’s just go deeper and make it special.”
That was probably the smartest direction Marvel could have taken. No Way Home was built around a premise that would be incredibly difficult to replicate, with Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield bringing three generations of Spider-Man together on the big screen.
Trying to manufacture something even larger could easily have turned the next movie into an exhausting game of cameo one-upmanship.
Instead, the idea that would eventually guide Brand New Day actually started forming while No Way Home was still being made.
Feige recalled looking at Holland alongside Zendaya and Jacob Batalon during production and realizing Marvel already had something just as valuable sitting right in front of them.
“I have a memory. We were on set of No Way Home, which of course was about Tobey and Andrew and Tom, three Spider-Men together. How do you get bigger than three Spider-Men together?
“Well, sitting on a golf cart outside the set were Zendaya and Jacob [Batalon] and Tom. And it occurred to me, looking at those three, that that trio is as iconic as the three Spider-Men. And now Brand New Day has proved that.”
It’s an interesting way to look at the franchise. Maguire and Garfield returning was the kind of superhero movie moment that comes around once in a generation, but the emotional core of Holland’s Spider-Man films has always depended heavily on Peter Parker’s relationships.
Recognizing that gave Marvel somewhere meaningful to go without having to toss another dozen characters through a multiverse portal.
The crazy part is that the smaller-minded approach, at least in terms of spectacle, resulted in an even bigger commercial hit.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has torn through box-office records since its release and has now earned more than $2 billion worldwide. That puts it ahead of No Way Home, which finished its theatrical run with roughly $1.9 billion globally.
So, while Marvel went into Brand New Day believing it couldn’t make a Spider-Man movie bigger than No Way Home, audiences had other plans.
More importantly, its success makes a strong case for not treating every superhero sequel like it needs to become a larger event than whatever came before it.
Sometimes Spider-Man just needs a great story worth swinging into.
