Tom Holland is coming out swinging with some fighting words about Spider-Man: Brand New Day. In a new behind-the-scenes production video for the film, Holland said, “This is some of the best action that we’ve had in any of these movies, and we’ve shot the most stunts on the day in-camera.”
Anticipation for Holland’s fourth solo outing as Peter Parker is already sky-high; the trailer for Brand New Day racked up over one billion views in just four days after its launch in March. After a series of uncharacteristic duds, Marvel Studios has been trying to get back to its roots with fan-favorite characters and an emphasis on quality. The new Brand New Day clip is such a transparent part of that strategy that it almost feels cynical—Holland’s comment about how shooting on a public street allows audiences to be part of the experience is such pitch-perfect marketing-speak nonsense it borders on satire—but the disbelief in director Destin Daniel Cretton’s voice when he talks about fans showing up to watch the cast and crew film the opening scene of the movie pushes it into “genuinely heartwarming” territory instead.
And, to be fair, the footage that they show in the trailer does look genuinely cool. Practical stunts are always nice to see in a genre that—sometimes necessarily, sometimes very much unnecessarily—often relies heavily on CGI. Of course, practical stunts and on-location filming aren’t an automatic indicator of a good Marvel film, as Eternals proved, but it’s still nice to see.
Earlier, Marvel released the first three pages of the script for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Like the new video, it was another carefully crafted marketing move that was still fun in spite of its transparent calculatedness. Maybe it’s not a good sign that much of the film’s marketing has been engaging in spite of itself, but can we really be blamed for wanting Spider-Man, perhaps the MCU’s most wholesome superhero, to succeed?
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens in theaters on July 31.
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