Spider-Man: Brand New Day Has High Ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's What Critics And Netizens Think

The reviews are in, and they're split on one thing. Tom Holland's fourth solo outing as Spider-Man premiered in Hollywood on Monday night, and the reactions landed super quickly. On Rotten Tomatoes, Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened at 93 per cent  and has since settled at 91 per cent putting it just behind No Way Home's 93 percent among Holland's three previous films. Homecoming sits at 92 percent, Far From Home at 91 percent. For a franchise four movies deep, that's a strong hand to be dealt.

The film is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who made Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and it picks up four years after No Way Home ended with Doctor Strange erasing Peter Parker from everyone's memory. MJ and Ned don't know who he is anymore. Peter is still working the streets of New York alone, until Jon Bernthal's Punisher enters the picture and a new villain played by Sadie Sink starts pulling the story in a direction nobody's been told about yet.

That secrecy is deliberate and Cretton has said in interviews that the film plays better if audiences go in without knowing what Sink is doing in it. Sink's role has become an online guessing game. The leading theory is Jean Grey, given the MCU's slow build toward the X-Men. Nobody's confirmed it.

On the reviews themselves, the split is less about quality and more about density. Fandango's Erik Davis called it more thoughtful and mature than the earlier trilogy, and singled out the Spider-Man and Punisher scenes as some of the best fights of the Holland era. Collider's Charlie Ridgley gave it an 8 out of 10 and called it the best Spidey film in two decades.

Esquire's own Eric Francisco wrote that the film has a strong emotional center and blistering action. Fans on social media have zeroed in on the Peter-MJ scenes, with several reactions online describing the Holland-Zendaya chemistry as practically rom-com material.

Not every reaction was a rave. Several critics flagged the same problem: too much plot. One widely shared review compared the film's highs and lows to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, praising the opening twenty minutes and the way the film handles loneliness, while criticizing a third act that gets hijacked by Sink's character and lands flat. Ned Leeds, in particular, gets pushed to the background, and the humour suffers for it. It's the same complaint few people had about Spider-Man 3: too many villains, too many ideas, not enough room for any of them to be fully fleshed out, apparently.

The Box Office Numbers Are Moving Fast

Box office expectations are high, and they keep climbing. Sony's early tracking had the domestic opening at $260 million to $280 million, well above the studio's original, far more conservative estimate. By this week, some projections put Brand New Day as high as $345 million, which would make it the second-biggest domestic opening in history, behind only Avengers: Endgame.

That’s a jump nobody called out three weeks ago, but the numbers make sense. This is the first new Spider-Man film in five years, the longest gap of the Holland era, so an audience that would usually spread its enthusiasm across two or three releases has all shown up for one. Some of it is really well-planned marketing. Sony built the campaign around Peter Parker's life after No Way Home instead of leaning on multiverse cameos, a departure from the last film's formula, since No Way Home's opening leaned hard on the return of Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin, a trick that only works once. 

Other than that, theatres have been having a good run lately as well. The summer’s had been relatively soft until The Odyssey arrived and pulled a major chunk of theatre-going audiences back in and Brand New Day is riding in right behind it, with advance sales reportedly outpacing even The Odyssey to make it Fandango's biggest first-day preseller of the year. Superhero fatigue is still around, and last year's underperformers like Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and Fantastic Four: First Steps prove it. Spider-Man keeps dodging that pattern because Holland's version of the character has always been an anxious, broke kid in a suit rather than a god with a hammer, and that's the version people keep showing up for, even given a five-year gap. 

No Way Home made close to $1.9 billion worldwide in 2021, and Brand New Day is expected to chase similar numbers, arriving just months before Avengers: Doomsday closes out the year in December.

Where India Fits In, And What Holland Says About The Film

For Indian audiences, the wait is shorter than usual. The film releases in India on July 30, a full day ahead of its global premiere on July 31. It comes in six languages: English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, and across most of the format options Indian multiplexes now offer, including 4DX 3D, ICE 3D, Dolby Cinema 3D and IMAX. The CBFC has reportedly trimmed an eight-second kissing scene along with some language before clearing it for release here, which is standard practice for Marvel films entering Indian theatres.

Holland, for his part, says this is the most involved he's been in shaping a Spider-Man film. He told LADbible he spent time going through fan discussions online to understand what people actually wanted from the character, then brought those ideas into meetings with the studio and the writers, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who've written every Holland-era Spider-Man film to date.

Whether Brand New Day ends up the best of the four is still being argued about online, hour by hour. What's clear is that it's the most divisive one so far, and that might be what keeps people talking about it through the weekend.