I won’t spoil what happens in Spider-Man: Brand New Day if, in return, you let me gripe about some of the things that don’t happen in it.
We’ve reached the point in online fan culture at which there’s so much speculation before a film comes out, some of it based on genuine leaks from low-level industry insiders, that the odds are good that people cruising YouTube and other sites in the months prior to a film’s release will have pieced together a better plot—one that almost came to pass—than the pared-down, Hollywood-bureaucracy-approved, shooting-schedule-compromised, Las Vegas-film-subsidies-shaped, toy-contracts-constrained, source-material-disregarding thing that finally shows in cinemas.
So, some things that would’ve made sense if they’d been included in Brand New Day—and for all we know may have been in a rough draft of the script or at least talked about in a meeting—but aren’t, include Peter Parker’s goofy friend Ned Leeds fulfilling his destiny from the comics and becoming the villain the Hobgoblin (which in theory might’ve jibed elegantly moniker-wise with him being temporarily mind-controlled by the evil Goblin Queen, a duplicate of telepath Jean Grey from the X-Men, if Goblin Queen turned out to be the film’s villain), Venom or the alien symbiote network of which he’s a part taking control of people (which would’ve offered a much bigger payoff to the almost sadistic recurring use of the phrase “V MAX” in the film, surely meant to allude without any payoff to Venom appearing in comics from Marvel’s MAX imprint), and Doctor Doom (who, prior to appearing as the main antagonist of this coming December’s Avengers: Doomsday, could’ve appeared here, even if only in a post-credits bit to confuse Peter with his Tony Stark-lookalike face and perhaps offer a Venom-infused black spider-costume in lieu of a blue-and-red suit full of Stark tech).
As we rapidly near the end of Marvel’s Multiverse Saga, you’ll also see no sign in this film of the multiverse (unless you take Peter’s brief mention of a multiple-Mysterios dream as confirmation via “dreamwalking” that Mysterio from a couple of Spider-Man movies ago hailed from the multiverse after all), and you won’t see a serious end credits sequence (the very brief one implies Spider-Man will be in space at some point in the future, but who won’t be?).
Again, I’m not spoiling. I’m helpfully lowering your expectations. Instead of all of the above, you get lots of quick little snippets of Peter facing mostly third-tier villains and facing the pain of having been forgotten by his old friends MJ and Ned.
The mind-controlling central menace, interestingly, isn’t only likened to demonic possession but is explicitly limited to operating with a radius of “33 feet.” The number 33 gets deployed so often in films and even real-world newspaper articles in juxtaposition to supernatural or criminal threats, you have to wonder at some point whether Freemasons (among whom 33 is the highest publicly-acknowledged layer of adept) rule the country, or at least rule Hollywood (there was an amazing montage on YouTube years ago of actors in numerous movies visibly wearing their Freemason rings for reasons having nothing to do with the film plots).
And speaking of Jean Grey from the X-Men, who has a daughter named Rachel Summers, are we sure it’s mere coincidence that just as this new Marvel movie was poised to open, a woman named Rachell Summers was murdered in California by a random, repeatedly-arrested lunatic? They say whatever strange conspiracy runs Hollywood, whether Freemasons, Satanists, or reptilians, sometimes demands a sacrifice just before a big project, sometimes involving a victim with a punning or spiritually-relevant name, in return for which the forces of darkness help make the project a hit or an Oscar-winner, sort of like voodoo with a living doll.
Maybe all that’s just crazy rumor, but it might help explain why, say, Jared Leto keeps being cast in lead roles despite the resulting projects failing and over 10 women accusing him of misconduct including sexual assault. Without being so literal or supernatural about it, might some of his projects have failed, ultimately, because the moviegoing public intuited, in some primal/moral way to which Hollywood itself is tone-deaf, that there’s something disturbingly wrong about Leto?
Or is Hollywood just so gosh-darn idealistic that no matter how many crimes are attributed to him, they still see the innocent young drug addict, Replicant mogul, 3D-printed robo-mercenary (does Ares count as the title character of Tron: Ares, by the way?), skeleton-headed dictator, or lab-made faux-vampire they saw on the big screen?
But if you really need a little Leto in your life, I hear, in all seriousness, that he and Alison Brie are hilarious as Skeletor and Evil-Lyn in the not-so-popular new Masters of the Universe movie (nearly 40 years after the prior live-action film by that name, as if to make Gen X feel skeletal itself). Come to think of it, Leto’s Morbius isn’t in Brand New Day either, so at least Sony is learning.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey