Why Tom Holland's Spider-Man really needs to grow up

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest instalment, is going to be a mega-hit. But Holland's incarnation is running out of web and needs to evolve – or hang up his costume for good.

The latest Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is expected to have the biggest opening weekend of any cinema release of 2026 so far. It could well go on to be the most lucrative blockbuster of the year. The franchise's previous instalment, Spider-Man: No Way Home, was a near $2bn (£1.5bn) hit which was the highest grossing film of 2021. And since then, fans have only grown fonder of its stars, Tom Holland and Zendaya, whose real-life romance seems to inspire more fervent fascination than any of the characters they play on screen.

Then there's the film itself, which is a well-crafted, action-packed addition to the colossally popular series. In some ways, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a gift to aficionados of the Marvel superhero universe, boasting as it does such nerd-friendly treats as a fight between Spidey and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), an unlikely team-up with the Punisher (Jon Bernthal, goofier and less scary than in his Disney small-screen incarnation), and all sorts of lore which I won't reveal here.

But at the same time Brand New Day could well leave fans with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction – a sense that Holland's Peter Parker / Spider-Man may be running out of web.

In the half decade since the last film came out, time has moved on for the characters, too. Spider-Man has done so much crime fighting that New Yorkers now adore him. (Arch Spidey-sceptic J Jonah Jameson is nowhere to be seen.) Meanwhile, his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) and his beloved once-girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) have both graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The snag is that due to some magic-related shenanigans in No Way Home, MJ and Ned have had their memories of Peter erased. Not only have they forgotten that he's Spider-Man, they've forgotten that he exists.

No Way Home finished with the promise that Peter would explain to them what had happened, but in Brand New Day we learn that he decided against it. For the sake of their safety, he has kept away from his friends, and now lives alone in a dusty attic, with only his........

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