SPINNING AROUND
IN SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY, PETER PARKER’S HAVING A TOUGH OLD TIME. BUT, AS SFX DISCOVERS, HIS WHOLE WORLD’S ABOUT TO CHANGE
WORDS: CLARISSE LOUGHREY
OR THE FIRST time, Spider-Man’s all alone. Aunt May is dead. So is Iron Man. And as a result of Doctor Strange’s spell in No Way Home, he’s become a total stranger to his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon). He can web-shoot villains all day, but when it’s time to clock out, there’s no one for Peter Parker to come home to. At the start of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the guy’s hit rock bottom.
Only, as producer Amy Pascal jokingly corrects SFX, “The sad thing about Peter is he’s sort of always at his lowest. But the thing is, so are we all.” It’s true that in a world of, to quote fellow hero Sam Wilson, “androids, aliens and wizards”, Peter’s always been the relatable one, the kid, as Pascal continues, “who’s poor, who doesn’t have great self-esteem, who wants the girl to love him, who needs a job to live”.
On top of his regular person concerns, he’s had to deal with: finding out his homecoming date’s dad is a supervillain, dematerialising into ash and ceasing to exist
for five years, being wrongly framed for murder and having his secret identity exposed to the world, and meeting himself from alternate realities and realising that he could have had Andrew Garfield’s magnificent ocean wave of a hairdo.
Yet, Brand New Day has, in a way, allowed Marvel to quietly hit the reset button on the character. Peter’s back in New York, as opposed to galaxy-hopping with the Avengers, working the daily grind of keeping his home city safe.