Red star tribune

A good movie doesn’t excuse the factory that made it. Not when that factory reduces cinema to content, artists to laborers, and audiences to consumers.

Originally published in Geese Magazine.

Marvel’s flagship is back in theaters, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is getting near-universal praise from fans and critics. Spider-Man, one of the key comic book characters in terms of intellectual property and profit margins, has made nearly $10 billion purely from the box office across all ten major theatrical releases. The lowest box office for the live-action adaptations is still over $700 million. It’s the surest bet that Marvel and Sony have to make near or more than a billion dollars at every swing of the web. 

But this time, it won’t really matter what Spider-Man makes in terms of economic return, or how lauded it is by the masses. The question isn’t how well-made this individual movie is, but how it is a reflection of the industry Disney and Sony have developed, a consolidation of Hollywood, and a political economy that constantly wages class war. 

That’s not to say this movie is bad. It isn’t a poorly made, acted, or written film. In fact, it may be the best Spider-Man movie in the MCU iteration of the franchise. The first half of the movie, and the first 15 minutes especially, are a return to the web-slinging, favorite neighborhood Spidey that the Sam Raimi movies fully captured. It was light and charming. It was grounded in a romanticized and comic-esque version of The Big Apple. Or, at least, it’s the closest the MCU has come to this version of Spider-Man. 

Director Destin Daniel Cretton only had a few movies of experience, a little independent work that was good (not great) and Just Mercy (2019), which critics acclaimed, before being poached by Marvel. This is the best work he’s done since Just Mercy, and it’s not even close. With the help of long-time collaborator and cinematographer Brett Pawlak, it’s the best-looking Spider-Man film since the Raimi era, with a deeply personal and naturalistic approach that stands in stark contrast to many blue-screen-dominated films of the MCU. To their credit, it feels like everyone is on location or a set together. It’s a sign that below-the-line workers, with direction that isn’t artistically bankrupt, can still produce high-quality scenes even when Disney engages in anti-union practices and constantly pushes for a rapid content pipeline instead of culturally impactful art. 

Tom Holland continues to do well in his role as Spider-Man, and like other returning supporting cast members, such as Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalon as Ned, they now have nearly a decade of films, story, and character development to help with elevating lifts even minimal screen time (as is the case for the latter). Jon Bernthal as The Punisher finally makes his cinematic appearance in the MCU and is one of the highlights of the movie in terms of his dynamic and chemistry with Tom Holland.

Sadie Sink’s big (non) reveal of being Jean Grey brought literal gasps in the theater (don’t laugh!), and people cheered every time Mark Ruffalo’s The Hulk was on screen, even though he saw far less screen time than marketing seemed to indicate. In addition, Sink’s Jean Grey role as the semi-antagonist of the film was a peculiar choice for a character that will ultimately be one of the key figures of the X-Men, adding an interesting element to the performance. It’s unfortunately a disjointed role as in the first half of the film, we never see her. She’s just telepathically controlling people where the movie explicitly refers to it as similar to demon possession and people are “pushed” into oncoming cars to their death. This first half is quite effective as a setup for the mystery antagonist. But when we finally see her and the reveal of who she is, the story quickly flips where she’s the one Spider-Man is attempting to save from the true villain of the film. 

The Department of Damage Control, the film’s true antagonist, is a government-corporate entity that experiments on super-powered individuals without oversight. It is not difficult to read this as an allegory for the very conglomerates that produce these films, entities that have been accused of labor violations, mass layoffs, and using their cultural influence to shape geopolitical narratives. When Spider-Man fights a system that treats people as disposable assets, he is fighting the logic of the very studio that profits from his image. 

But the rapid rotating of antagonists ends up hurting the film more than helping it. Of course, a movie twist is perfectly acceptable. That’s not the issue. Spider-Man Brand New Day’s problem is it wants to be so many different movies at the same time. It wants to be the down-to-the-cobblestones, simple story of the friendly spider in the neighborhood–but it also wants to set up, via 4D chess, the next decade of the MCU with Jean Grey. The X-Men’s introduction as villains comes up as ham-fisted. And the themes of the movie are the same milquetoast hallmark themes of found family and believing in yourself has been done in every Spider-Man movie. What’s truly original about this movie? 

Looming over the entire production is the spectre of Doomsday, Marvel’s upcoming crossover Blockbuster slated for later this year. The MCU has so thoroughly deformed the film industry, reducing cinema to content, artists to laborers, and audiences to consumers. Not even the communal ritual of opening day and a packed theater could transport me. No amount of craft could erase the knowledge that this iteration of Spider-Man is already obsolete, a placeholder for the reboot Feige has already announced.

Kevin Feige, the Tsar of Marvel, has said that post-Doomsday and Secret Wars, the MCU “will establish a streamlined, simplified, single universe that we can keep up with…Some things will be familiar, but many, many things will be entirely new.” The era of the multiverse of madness is over. We will see a soft reboot of the MCU in the very near future. Tom Holland has also said he has a “really clear vision to the passing on of the baton…” so what emotional investment can I really have in this version of Spider-Man? If the whole point of the MCU is not really the individual films, but the sheer mass of content to consume that’s constantly sequel-ized, how do we judge something that clearly has a diminishing lifespan and is coming to an end? 

The MCU’s dominance has transformed Disney into a monopoly that acquires competitors at an alarming rate and reduces cinema to a content pipeline. In Spider-Man’s case, this machinery is shared with Sony, creating a duopoly over one of the most valuable intellectual properties in history. The human cost of this consolidation is well-documented: anti-union campaigns, mass layoffs of VFX workers, racist and sexist workplace scandals, and, most recently, corporate figures openly supporting the Palestinian genocide. These are not incidental failures of the system; they are structural features of an industry that prioritizes shareholder value over human dignity.

It’s clear as day that there’s an utter lack of creativity and narrative cohesion post-Endgame across the too many to count straight-to-streaming TV shows and box office bombs. The Doomsday trailer finally releasing on the same weekend as the mega-hit and truly cinematic The Odyssey was a dud. It quickly became a meme to respond to the trailer for what was supposed to be Marvel’s big 2026 hit with Robert Pattinson’s “get these beggars out of here” line from the aforementioned Nolan film. Everything in that trailer felt inauthentic–from the horrible special effects to the narrative to the constant reheating of proven commodities. The biggest franchise that rewrote Hollywood is culturally expired now. Spider-Man may be able to weather that storm for now. But we are already seeing casualties, like the failed attempts to continue the Ant Man movies. . 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day will surely pass a billion dollars at the box office and be (rightfully) praised for being above the average comic book movie nowadays. However, the era of the MCU is coming to a close. 

People want to see genuine art. That is why films like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a sweeping, practical-effects-driven epic, or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (also shot on film), which grounds its supernatural horror in Black history and struggle, have captured the cultural imagination. These films are not merely ‘better’ than the MCU (they are); they represent a different relationship between artist and audience, one where the director’s vision is not subordinated to a franchise’s five-year plan. They are stories that want to be told, not products that need to be sold. 

As I previously wrote in my review for The Odyssey, people want authenticity when they go to the cinemas. They want to be transported but also not be a voyeur in the further alienation of humans in our society. The MCU has been a personification of the commodification of art and the further alienation of humanity due to the way it conducts itself as an industry dragon, hoarding and consuming wealth and franchises inside the Los Angeles Hills for the sake of it. 

Artists and actors such as the director and the entire crew of this film don’t lack artistic vision. We’ve seen them show their vision in moments in this film and throughout their collective careers. This is a good, well-made movie. This is the best-looking Holland Spider-Man movie, and people seem to be responding quite well to it. But a well-made product does not excuse the factory that produces it, especially when that product has already been recalled (and awaiting a reboot). It does not erase the fact that the MCU is dying under the weight of its own accumulated financial success, increasingly rendering itself superfluous in its own narrative.

The fact that Cretton, Holland, and crew made something good within a dying franchise and an extremely oppressive industry is a testament to their craft. However, it won’t reverse time to when the MCU was dominant. That time is long gone, and won’t come back so long as corporate greed dominates the human craft of storytelling.