Drive-in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: Spider Man Brand New Day (2026)
The Drive-in Saturday Tuesday movie review is a seasonal feature in which I review movies I see at drive-in theaters. The name of the segment is taken from the Bowie song, though often the movies have no direct Bowie connection. Part of the fun is finding indirect Bowie connections, and a perhaps surprising number of these movies actually use a Bowie song in the soundtrack or are otherwise related to Bowie. But at the end of the day, this segment is a movie review!
Movie: Spider Man Brand New Day (2026)
Bowie Connection: Scenes from this movie were filmed in Bowie’s New York neighborhood— there’s even a reference to the street where he lived. Bowie’s Ziggy-era band was the Spiders from Mars, and his 1987 tour was named for his song, “Glass Spider.” Thematically, a theme of this movie was Peter Parker’s struggle to separate his personal self from the character he puts out for public consumption, which Bowie could have related to. That said, neither Bowie nor his music appear in the movie.
Experience: We went on opening night, to the Jericho— this was the most crowded I have ever seen this drive-in. Almost all the space was taken. It was a lovely night and we sat on lawn chairs rather than in the car, a first for this season.
Movie Review: Three weeks later, I’m still thinking about The Odyssey, a movie I didn’t actually like. This is in part because this Spider Man movie stars three of the actors who were also in The Odyssey— Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal. But also because Spider Man was as good a movie as any to contrast two of my biggest problems with The Odyssey— I could hear the dialogue and clearly see what was happening on the screen. The special effects were convincing, the fight scenes were well-choreographed, and, although there were some slow-patches, I wasn’t bored. None of this would have stood out had they not been problems I had with the last movie I saw, which happened to have the same actors and was also a big-budget special effects epic. That said, all of this amounts to a pretty low bar. Spider Man leapt over it, as he’s prone to do, but he’d have to leap higher for me to have actually liked the movie. And, fortunately, he did. Brand New Day is exactly the type of movie I like seeing at a drive-in.
In addition to those threshold qualities, Brand New Day is some sort of commentary on something that’s happening in society today. This, too is a common quality of genuinely good fantasy movies. Good special effects are not enough to sustain a full-length movie, and while, I suppose, good dialogue doesn’t necessarily have to be relatable, in practice the one thing tends to have to with the other. So, in this case, the issue is isolation made worse by living almost purely as a public persona.
Brand New Day is a direct sequel to the 2021 Movie Spider Man: No Way Home, which ends with the world forgetting Peter Parker (Holland) thanks to a magic spell. Peter consented to the spell being cast to keep his loved ones safe from bad guys who want to hurt them to get to him. As Brand New Day starts, we see that Peter is keeping tabs on his former friend, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) via something like Instagram. On one of the short videos Peter watches, MJ asks Ned, “who really watches these things, anyway?”
This is the cleverest moment in the movie. MJ and Ned are making videos for no purpose, projected into the void, where they are secretly being watched. As the story moves along, Peter, who also shows up in person to interact with MJ and Ned without them noticing much, fantasizes that there is some deep, suppressed two-way connection. There isn’t. Peter’s fantasy is less about him knowing them, than that on some level, they know him. How many fans of Tom Holland or Zendaya feel that way about them? But the main point is not about parasocial relationships, it’s that the social media identity is false. So, too, is Spider Man.
Not unlike Bowie’s various characters, which he inhabited as vessels for his own inhibition as a performer, the smart-aleck superhero is a construct, through which the reserved and self-questioning Peter Parker lets loose. Except now, he’s in near total isolation. His interactions with real people are superficial and transactional. And as a result, he is not only becoming more and more one with Spider Man, but more and more spider-like.
A somewhat unresolved subplot of the movie is that the spider-stuff that gave Peter his super powers is causing further changes in Peter’s physiology, and psychology. He’s becoming a monster. Unless I missed it, Peter never fully figures out what to do with this, but it becomes less of an issue after he opens up to MJ and begins developing human friendships, first of all with her, but also with the Punisher (Bernthal), who is also suffering from isolation, and finally with Ned.
As an analogy to people, especially younger people, losing their souls to their avatars, Brand New Day could have been cleverer, but it also could have been a lot dumber. So, I not only count this theme as the movie’s triumph, but enough to make me care, which in turn is enough to bring all its should-go-without-saying elements home. So, again, I liked the movie.
This is not to say that Brand New Day is flawless. It sits at the intersection not only of different MCU storylines, but also storylines that had existed outside the MCU but have to be brought in before the big mashup on the horizon, Avengers: Doomsday, which is slated for release in December. The problem is, to pick up on all the threads, Brand New Day demands that its audience have seen more movies and shows than I can identify because I haven’t seen them all. I definitely felt like I missed something.
This is not a fatal flaw. I don’t think everything needs to be explained. I didn’t feel lost. But still, disorientation is usually desirable in a movie only when used as part of the storytelling. In this case, my occasional sense of disorientation felt more like I just hadn’t done my homework.
The other problem worth noting is that critics would call the movie’s pacing. It seems to come to an end, before being brought back from the brink for an entire third act. And then that comes to an end with—- OK, SPOILER ALERT— Peter getting shot and seeming like he was going to die. People die in Marvel movies, so maybe this was it for Peter Parker. For a moment, that’s where I thought it was going.
But that was only for a moment. There was virtually no time to feel tension about whether or not Peter was going to make it. Worse, there’s a strong hint that one of the other characters used super powers to heal Peter. Enough had been established about Peter’s spider powers for the idea that he could recover quickly wouldn’t have seemed too strange, but this other character had not been established as having healing powers, so that seemed arbitrary.
OK, that wasn’t fatal either. These small imperfections were not enough for me to feel like I couldn’t have realistically asked for much more out of a drive-in movie. My only hope is that the next one doesn’t take another five years!
Rating: Four webs. A movie doesn’t need to be perfect for me to give it my highest rating. I am not assessing these things for whether they are great movies, but rather how much did I like going to see them at the drive-in. I was hoping to like this movie and I did like this movie. Mission accomplished. That’s enough.