At this point, saying Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a good movie is basically like saying water is wet. The movie absolutely smashed box office records, received very positive reviews, and has easily been one of the MCU’s greatest triumphs since Avengers: Endgame, if not the single greatest triumph overall. Myriad factors went into making this movie as excellent and well-received as it was, from the unsurprisingly brilliant acting of Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, and many others to the storyline that actually felt inventive and engaging (and not just because Brand New Day confirmed Sink’s character is indeed Jean Grey, as many had hoped). Yet, it wasn’t just the overarching narrative of Brand New Day that worked.
Rather, numerous individual scenes were also impactful in and of themselves, particularly the one in which Peter Parker leaves the hospital and is surrounded by people cheering for Spider-Man, who of course have no idea that Peter is actually Spider-Man, standing right there (thanks to Doctor Strange’s spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home). Yes, it’s a funny scene as well because Frank Castle dons the Spider-Man mask as a distraction so Peter can leave, but it’s also a very emotional moment, wherein Peter gets to experience just how much people do really love and appreciate Spider-Man—something that was especially meaningful after Brand New Day revealed just how lonely he’d been. Already, this scene was one of the best in the entire movie, but President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige’s comments about this scene have actually made it so much better.
Getting to see Peter finally experience the appreciation he deserved was already exactly what Brand New Day needed after such brutally sad scenes depicting Peter’s solitude (after all, it was literally changing his DNA). What has made it so much better, though, is Kevin Feige’s confirmation that this scene was something that actually happened with real people. Per The Direct, while Feige was speaking at the University of Southern California, he explained, “The very first week of production, and there were hundreds of people on the street, and they were all filming. So, it got a lot of press, but it happened to also look awesome, because there was a giant rig above this tank driving and an actual stuntman swinging back and forth through it and landing on the side of it.”
Feige continued, “And that really invigorated all of us and Destin [Daniel Cretton]…people literally coming out and saying, ‘We love you, Spider-Man,’ like at the end of the movie, happened on the first day of production on this movie. And that sense of how thrilling it is for people to know that on some level there was a guy in a suit swinging, swinging through the streets.” It’s easy to understand why that experience would lend itself to a scene in the movie, and, in fact, it’s not the first of its kind in Spider-Man movies. Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy, for example, also showed such celebrations, including in Spider-Man 3, when he kissed Gwen Stacy in front of everyone. This scene undoubtedly had considerably more impact than that one, though, and it’s all the better knowing that it was tied to real fans.
