‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Will Not Be Enough To Save The MCU
As Matthew McConaughey once said in the scientifically accurate Interstellar, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
For every Lindsay Lohan that has victoriously returned to Hollywood after a decade of soul-searching, there is a sprawling, problematic MCU that is just setting money on fire now. This was supposed to be the MCU’s comeback year, but unfortunately, the tigers came at night and killed the dream the MCU dreamed. There are storms we cannot weather!
It feels strained to say that the MCU needs a comeback. The franchise is one of the most recognizable brands in the world and makes enough money in one movie to feed all of Earth for half of a day. That’s breakfast and lunch! That said, movie producers care more about whether they have enough money to paint all of their toilets gold, and in that sense, the MCU has been a failure. Between Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, the franchise has lost tens of millions of dollars. The jury’s still out on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but no one at Marvel is buying any preemptive superyachts either.
But will 2026’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day help the MCU make a comeback from this comeback? No. Here’s why.
1. The MCU has lost its casual fans
I, a casual Marvel fan, would no longer watch these movies if it weren’t part of my job to follow movie trends. The two pigeons feuding outside my apartment provide me with sufficient dinnertime entertainment. Unfortunately, many others feel the same. Thanks to convoluted storytelling, a quantity over quality mindset, and an overall lack of vision, the MCU has produced not a few stinkers in the years since Avengers: Endgame, losing much goodwill in the process.
But Brave New World was supposed to lure us back. It had a new Captain America, a fresh face! It signalled a fresh new direction! Except it was mediocre. It received a 46% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Any casual fans who had dipped their toes back into the MCU out of curiosity had been turned off. The swiftly declining box office numbers for Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four have proven it. Not even positive word-of-mouth and good reviews turned things around.
2. This throws a wrench in Doomsday plans
Here is a new problem: Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four are the only recent movies that have pointed to concrete events in the future. Anyone who has watched them knows that the Thunderbolts, a.k.a. The New Avengers, will be teaming up with the Fantastic Four, possibly to fight Doctor Doom. Anyone who has not watched them, which is most of the planet, does not know or care that Doctor Doom is causing drama. That’s not a great starting point for a studio trying to drum up excitement for Avengers: Doomsday in 2026.
3. Brand New Day doesn’t fit into the story
Fantastic Four was the MCU’s last in-universe chance to get people interested in the direction of the franchise. The only other MCU movie scheduled to premiere before Doomsday is Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It will surely make bank off of the charm of its star, Tom Holland. However, it will do nothing to get people excited for Doomsday. Brand New Day will reportedly not tie in with Doomsday, at least not directly; and Tom Holland won’t even appear in Doomsday. What if Brand New Day were to make twice as much money as Doomsday? Would Kevin Feige quit Hollywood and go to med school?
4. Ugh Jonathan Majors
There is now just one movie remaining before Doomsday. If this were the Infinity Saga, then Thanos would have already been introduced by now, along with his mythology surrounding Gamora and Nebula and his quest for the Infinity Stones. Of course, this was supposed to happen with Kang the Conqueror already, but Jonathan Majors is no longer with us, figuratively speaking. (He’s dead to Kevin Feige.) As a result, Marvel has had to shoehorn in Doctor Doom at the last minute. Thus, we have little sense of his powers or intentions and can’t see him as a major threat without using our imaginations. It’s 2025 and Tiktok exists. Why would we want to use our imaginations? Anyway, there’s no real momentum leading up to Doom’s supposed major villain moment in Doomsday.
But will casual MCU fans discover Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four on streaming in the next year and get excited for a Doom showdown? Maybe! But there’s this other problem…
5. Movie theaters all smell like feet
Movie tickets cost like $20 now! At that price, each person should have their own personal masseuse for the duration of their movie. Instead, they end up paying $20 for sticky floors, seats that smell like feet, and a theater full of dabbing Generation Alphas.
Maybe Doomsday will be good enough on streaming to get butts in seats for Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027. But will Doomsday make Marvel enough money in the meantime? Possibly not, thanks to the final nail in MCU’s coffin…
6. Robert Downey Jr.’s paycheck
The man is reportedly making more than $100 million for his roles in Doomsday and Secret Wars. That means his paycheck will make up 5% of the entire budget of each film. If Doomsday fails to break even with its astronomical $1 billion+ budget – which at this point is very likely – then decisions like that are the reason. What if Doomsday were to miss the break-even point by Downey’s entire paycheck? Would Kevin Feige be put in jail? The bottom line is that Disney is putting a lot of confidence in this film that few people are clamoring to see (well, compared to Infinity Wars.) Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch my pigeons.
