Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters, opening a whole new chapter in the saga of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. Four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker (Holland) is living a lonely life, as the rest of the world has forgotten him, including his closest friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya). Brand New Day tells a deeply dramatic story about Peter using “Spider-Man” to avoid his own pain and grief, and what kind of physical and emotional toll it costs.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton took a big swing on one of the deeper and more serious Spider-Man character studies ever done, and it has sparked all kinds of discourse within the Marvel fandom. One of the biggest topics coming out of Brand New Day‘s record-setting opening weekend is which live-action Spider-Man has had the hardest time of things.
Spider-Man: No Way Home brought in former Spider-Man actors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield for a very meta-style debate on which Spider-Man had the most trauma – but a lot has changed since the film was released in 2021. After Spider-Man: Brand New Day, we decided to take the question directly to the fans: “Which Live-Action Spider-Man Had The Hardest Time?”
Which Live-Action Spider-Man Had The Hardest Time?
Call it recency bias if you want, but Tom Holland got nearly double the votes received by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to be crowned the hardest-luck version of Spider-Man out of the three versions featured in live-action movies. Now let’s break down why.
Again, let’s set aside the possibility that seeing Brand New Day is currently making fans feel a swell of sympathy for Holland’s Spider-Man. During the “Home trilogy” from director Jon Watts, Peter Parker/Spider-Man lost quite a bit. In Homecoming, he had to sabotage his own first love and relationship with his high school crush, Liz (Laura Harrier), upon discovering that her dad was the supervillain known as The Vulture (Michael Keaton). Far From Home is all about Peter dealing with the loss of his father-figure, Tony Stark/Iron Man, in Avengers: Endgame, after having already been orphaned at a young age.
Peter also lost five years of his own life after being dusted by Thanos, the Infinity Gauntlet, and “The Snap” that killed off half of all life in the universe, including Spider-Man. Then, No Way Home delivered the biggest blow of all, when Norman Osborn/Green Goblin killed Peter’s Aunt May (Marissa Tomei), leaving the Wall-Crawler teetering on the brink of darkness, and traumatizing him so deeply that he severed every personal tie he ever had to prevent the possibility of such loss ever happening to him again. It’s only in his fourth film, Brand New Day, that Holland’s Spider-Man is even beginning to deal with his mental health and working through his trauma.
When you read all that history back, it’s pretty clear that Holland’s Spider-Man has simply had more loss and a bigger scale than his predecessors. It’s a fact that No Way Home acknowledged (just briefly), when the “Three Peters” are chit-chatting about their respective lived experiences as Spider-Man, just before their final battle with the Sinister Six. Maguire and Garfield are amazed at how Holland has gotten to be part of a much larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, fighting aliens and teaming up with other heroes (or entire teams of them) to save the world. And, being Spider-Man, that bigger responsibility has come with some bigger losses.
That’s not to take away from Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield: An entire generation of early comic book movie fans felt Uncle Ben’s death in Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man (2002), and felt the pain of Spider-Man 3’s disappointment, at the cost of James Franco’s Harry Osborn dying in his friends’ arms. Uncle Ben’s (Martin Short) death in The Amazing Spider-Man felt like too much retread to get respect, but if we’re talking about the single, biggest, gut-punch tragic moment in Spider-Man live-action films, Garfield’s Spider-Man losing his love Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 may be it. Considering the real-life relationship between Stone and Garfield at the time, there was some real emotion in Garfield’s grief and heartbreak that cannot be topped.
All in all, Spider-Man movies have all gotten the tortured and traumatized core of the character right. Brand New Day just makes the best showcase of it and puts it to good use, the way Spider-Man should.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters!
