I already said my piece on the Marvel Cinematic Universe over six years ago in this story I wrote for student newspaper Woroni.
The story has never been about death. It’s always about getting left behind.
I knew for months beforehand that I wanted to write a story about Avengers: Endgame. It was a big, cinematic moment. Having been sucked into the MCU tornado by the awe of Black Panther, I spent the four months or so pre Endgame catching up on all the movies I’d missed.
As I watched several MCU movies back to back, I became increasingly annoyed at how often characters came back from the dead. It cheapened things, I thought. There was so much death in the MCU and so little of it was permanent. Even without having seen a single minute of Endgame, I started drafting the piece in my head.
Then I saw the movie. I watched it in a sold-out cinema on the evening of release day. I laughed. I cried. I gasped. I rang my brother as soon as I got home to debrief. We traded stories about how our audiences had reacted.
‘People in my cinema went nuts when Captain America got the hammer,’ I told him.
‘My cinema clapped and cheered when they went back to New York,’ my brother revealed of his midday screening in Melbourne.
My mouth gawped open. ‘No way.’
After I hung up the phone, I cracked open my laptop and started to write. I knew I had to throw out everything I’d been planning over the last few months. All I’d been thinking about was death, death, death. Permanence. Infinity. Finality.
I think it had started to sink in when the text reading ‘Five years later’ had come up on screen early in the film. That Endgame was a story about the survivors. About death, but more interested in what comes after.
Some people think that grief is a taboo subject. That not enough people talk about it. Maybe this is true in real life. But the older I get, the more convinced I become that grief is at the heart of all our stories. It’s everywhere. Embedded in everything is the universal truth that we would each die for a person we love; the thought of losing them and carrying out without them is so terrible.
Six years later, as I watched Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I thought: I’ve seen this film before. Not just because it’s the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man film. Not just because Tom Holland is the third actor to play the live-action character of Spider-Man this century. But because it was another film about grief.
At the end of the previous instalment Spider-Man: No Way Home, the only way to save the world is for Peter to ask Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell which means that everyone will forget who he is. Given that his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) has just died, he has no family to worry about, which leaves girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) as the main concerns.
MJ asks Peter to promise to come and find her. Make her remember who he is. Peter promises, and he tracks down MJ to the donut shop where she is working, but he can’t bring himself to disrupt her life.
Brand New Day opens four years later. Peter’s life is boiled down to a pretty simple routine: bunker down in his studio apartment, fight crime as the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man and buy grocery store flowers to take to Aunt May’s grave.
While the absence of Aunt May is very much still felt, the movie is mostly an exploration of a different kind of grief: the complicated grief over a person who is still alive. Peter still clings onto the coffee cup from MJ’s donut shop and the handwritten notes of the speech he was planning to give her. He stalks Ned’s social media to keep tabs on their lives. They are living out the plans that the three of them used to share: graduate high school, go to MIT and get an apartment in New York. It’s clear that Peter misses them terribly, especially MJ.
But is MJ even the same person who Peter made that promise to? Not only does she have no memory of him, she has lived and grown across four years completely disconnected from him.
Another MCU Peter, of the Quill variety played by Chris Pratt, has to learn a similar thing about Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
I left the cinema after Brand New Day thinking: I’ve seen this film before. And I’ve written this review before. What more is there to say?
Well, I still don’t really know what the answer to grief is. I don’t know if anyone does. The stories are for trying to make sense of it all. That’s why they keep coming. That’s why I keep watching and reading them.
Brand New Day suggests a few things: make some new friends. Get out of your rut. Remember the people who made you who you are. But try to find a small sliver of peace in growing away from them.
Rating: Recommend
Film: Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Writer: Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (based on Spider-Man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko)
Starring: Tom Holland (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Zendaya (Michelle ‘MJ’ Jones-Watson), Sadie Sink (Jean Grey), Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds), Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/Punisher), Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova/Black Widow), Tramell Tillman (Bill Metzger), Marisa Tomei (Aunt May) and Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk)
Release Date: 31 July 2026
Distributor: Currently showing in cinemas