Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal and Sadie Sink joined director Destin Daniel Cretton and producers Amy Pascal and Kevin Feige at The Edge in New York City on July 17 for a global press conference on SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY, two weeks ahead of the movie’s release.
“I think you really meet Peter Parker at the beginning of the darkest chapter of his life,” Holland told moderator Josh Horowitz.
Holland called BRAND NEW DAY “a cautionary tale for the dangers of living a life alone and not having a community, not having friends.” Peter ignores advice Andrew Garfield’s version of the hero passed down in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, Holland said, “and it is having a profound effect on his life as a human being.”
Pascal explained why the movie shrinks the story down instead of going bigger after NO WAY HOME united three different Spider-Men on screen. “We put ourselves in a really difficult position at the end of that movie,” Pascal said, “because those movies that we’d made before were all about people finding out who Spider-Man was.” This time, she added, the team wanted “a movie that was smaller and that was about somebody’s personal life.”
Getting there took a scare, according to Holland, who credited Cretton with rescuing a production that “was going in a hundred different directions.” Cretton, who joined the franchise after directing MARVEL’s SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS, said the title captures something “Peter hasn’t quite learned yet at the beginning of this movie” — a fresh start several characters chase over the course of the story.
Related: Does Peter Parker’s Best Friend Turn Bad in BRAND NEW DAY?
Zendaya’s MJ and Batalon’s Ned Leeds spend the movie as strangers to Peter, a side effect of the memory spell that erased him from everyone’s minds at the end of NO WAY HOME. “Unfortunately for Peter, Ned and MJ live really great full lives,” Batalon joked, drawing laughs from the room, though he added their characters still sense “something’s kind of missing.” Zendaya said MJ and Peter have effectively swapped personalities since he lost his community: “Now that he’s alone, he’s kind of adopted that negativity, and she’s adopted his positivity without even knowing it.”
Movieguide® tracked that mystery for weeks through Ned’s viral in-universe “Spidey Tracker” website, which turns out to double as his own quiet hunt for Spider-Man’s identity in the finished movie.
Bernthal makes his big-screen debut as Frank Castle, the Punisher, after a decade playing the character on television, and he didn’t take the tonal jump into a PG-13 franchise lightly. “I’m enormously protective of Frank and the Punisher fans and what he stands for,” Bernthal said, calling the crossover “a real question” for everyone involved. Holland backed him up: “We don’t compromise Frank and the Punisher in any way.”
Sink’s character remains a mystery even after the press conference, where she answered Horowitz’s attempts to crack her secret with a firm “No.”
“I can’t even say who I’m playing, which is pretty extreme,” Sink told Collider in a separate interview the same week. Feige said Sink landed the role without an audition after co-producer Emily Fong suggested her for a character Cretton had already worked with her on elsewhere.
Holland called Sink’s performance “a breath of fresh air” and “an unsung hero” of a movie built around withheld secrets. Movieguide® has followed BRAND NEW DAY’s road to theaters for over a year, including Sink’s own account of Holland making her Marvel debut feel less intimidating than she expected.
Movieguide®’s review of the franchise’s last outing, NO WAY HOME, praised its “strong moral, redemptive premise that everyone deserves a second chance” while flagging language and violence for families to weigh. That same discernment applies here, given Bernthal’s R-rated vigilante now shares the screen in a PG-13 movie. SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY opens in theaters July 31.
Read Next: SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Promises ‘Rebirth’
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
