Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Now Playing Podcast Presents: The Spider-Man Retrospective Series

The hosts provide an in-depth review of the new Spider-Man film, 'Brand New Day,' set five years after the events of No Way Home. They explo

Key takeaways

• The film introduces Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, signaling a major shift toward mutants in the MCU.
• Arnie expresses strong dissatisfaction with the Screen X format, citing motion sickness and visual distractions.

Main topics

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day Plot Review
• MCU Timeline and Continuity

Notable quotes

If I'm still playing Spider-Man in my 30s, I've done something wrong.

Conclusion

A detailed breakdown for fans that balances excitement over new charac

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:02) There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if we could become something more. We could fight the battles that Speaker 2 (0:25) they never could. Speaker 5 (0:27) I'm here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative. Speaker 4 (0:39) Welcome to Now Playing Podcast Review of Spider-Man Brand New Day. Speaker 2 (0:43) Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing, even if it breaks Peter Parker's heart. Speaker 4 (0:48) Part of Now Playing's Avengers and Marvel Comics movie series. Speaker 5 (0:52) The Avengers, that's what we call ourselves. Earth's mightiest heroes. Speaker 4 (0:57) Hosted by Arnie. I'm not one of those weirdos, I swear. He's a little weird. Justin. Speaker 5 (1:02) We love you, not because you're special. We love you because you're you. Speaker 4 (1:06) And Stuart. Sorry about him. He's just like very excited about your hair. Speaker 5 (1:16) What are you prepared to do? Speaker 4 (1:18) At NowPlayingPodcast.com, you can find reviews that span the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Speaker 5 (1:25) You just don't know when to give up, do you? I could do this all day. Speaker 4 (1:28) But be warned, this episode will contain detailed plot spoilers and mildly objectionable language. Speaker 5 (1:35) I am Speaker 4 (1:35) good at it. More language! Listener discretion is advised. Speaker 5 (1:40) If you're going to do something, you better do it now! Speaker 4 (1:43) We hope you enjoy the show. Showtime, a-holes! Speaker 2 (1:51) Today we're discussing Spider-Man Brand New Day. Starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Florence Pugh. There's so many spoilers just in this cast list. Trammell Tillman, Marissa Tomei, and Mark Ruffalo. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. This is your friendly neighbor, Arnie, co-hosting Outplaying. And Stuart. And this is Justin. Welcome back to the Spider-Verse. It was in Sony's contract. I don't know how it is with their deal with Marvel now, but they had to put out a Spider-Man movie every five years to keep the license. That's why they rushed out the Andrew Garfield film. And here it is, five years Speaker 1 (2:37) since No Way Home. That is forever. But not five years without Spider-Man. We've had an animated film or two. There's Spider Noir. I don't know if anybody's watching it, but that's a well-regarded TV show. If you want Spider-Man, he's always around. He's the Macy's Day Parade every November. He's floating down New York City street. He's there if you want him. I feel like there's never a chance Speaker 3 (3:02) to miss Spider-Man. You say it's been five years, but it's like it doesn't feel like it's been five years since the last Spider-Man movie. Speaker 1 (3:09) But you know what? I'm wondering if maybe you and I, Justin, are just more casual Spider-Man watchers. For the super fans, Arnie, I think you've been counting the minutes since this movie would be released. Speaker 2 (3:21) Not Speaker 1 (3:22) necessarily that Speaker 2 (3:23) level of hyped, but I Speaker 1 (3:25) have been excited for it. You definitely told me how many days it was until the film opened, and it was an odd number. Speaker 2 (3:34) But I've been watching No Way Home quite a lot in the past five years. I would say that has surpassed Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 1 and 2 in my Spider-Man watching. When I feel like a spider flick now, and I love Spider-Verse, but I just don't often go to cartoons, I watch No Way Home a lot. I've really just come to love that film. Probably my favorite Spider-Man movie alongside Into the Spider-Verse. easily the best live action Spider-Man, no question. I'd Speaker 3 (4:07) say personally, for me, my excitement for this Spider-Man kind of hinged on how good that last one was, right? That kind of felt like it was wrapping up the whole Tom Holland arc of Spider-Man, except for the fact that they left it with that question, hey, does anybody remember him? If they had just left that part out, that would have been a nice button hook to that Tom Holland era Spider-Man. Speaker 1 (4:28) That movie is so much about nostalgia that it really didn't tell us what was going to happen going forward. It just told us what Spider-Man had been, not who he could be in a new movie. So I wasn't expecting this new movie. Tom Holland played some hardball on contract Speaker 2 (4:44) negotiations because when that movie came out, he's like, well, it was the end of a trilogy and I'm happy to be done. His exact quote is, if I'm still playing Spider-Man in my 30s, I've done something wrong. He's 29 now. But I think this was contract negotiation. I really do feel like he had Sony over a barrel. The producer of these films, Amy Pascal, came out right after No Way Home and is like, we have plans for another trilogy. Kevin Feige is like, we are not ending our partnership with Sony. We want more of these. And Holland was like, oh, no, no, I'm good. I got other stuff going on. I don't need to be Spider-Man anymore. And I think they realize without Captain America, without Iron Man, Spider-Man, even though it's a shared property with Sony, is the biggest thing Marvel has still. This thing is breaking all time box office records, outgrossing Endgame, breaking the record for biggest opening, biggest preview night. And so they weren't going to let him go. And now he's like, oh, I may need to change it if I'm still playing Spider-Man at 37. But playing Spider-Man has been the joy of my life. I'll do it for as long as they'll have me, as long as they'll pay me a shit ton of money so I can own my non-alcoholic beer company and do all my private profit-making ventures. And Speaker 1 (6:12) I will just say, Odyssey excluded. I've seen other movies that he's been in, and he would not be the star he is without Spider-Man. Speaker 3 (6:20) I still kind of feel like Tom Holland is the new guy in the Spider-Man universe, but he's been Spider-Man for 10 years now. So that kind of makes him the longest running theatrical Spider-Man that we've ever had. Speaker 2 (6:31) If you Speaker 1 (6:31) don't count Toby coming back. Yeah. Call it a brand new day, we could have had a brand new Spider-Man, for sure. I don't feel like it had to be Holland. But then again, you're talking to someone that wasn't in love with that trilogy. I thought No Way Home was great. I haven't thought any other live-action Spider-Man movie was good. I Speaker 2 (6:49) felt that way about Homecoming and Far From Home. I liked them. I didn't love them. I think that Holland's films got progressively better. Homecoming was probably the shakiest of them all, although I really liked what Michael Keaton was doing and the, oh my God, it's my girlfriend's dad reveal. And then Far From Home with Jake Gyllenhaal I thought was quite a bit better. And then, yeah, again, No Way Home, all-timer. It's got heart. It's got sadness. It's got nostalgia. So, yeah, I was excited for this more than I've been excited for a Marvel movie in quite Speaker 1 (7:25) some time. I know that you've been calling it the movie of the summer, bigger than Odyssey. I haven't been feeling it, but I did go back. I watched the Mark Webb trilogy. And it's worth pointing out that the director that shepherded all of Tom Holland's solo Spider-Man movies is not here. It is a brand new day for the director. Well, he's worked in the MCU. We'll talk about Wonder Man next week. Shang-Chi is where Destin Daniel Cretton met the MCU. But he is known for kind of indie movies about coming of age. Short Term 12 is kind of where Brie Larson got discovered. And The Glass Castle. both about difficult childhoods. Speaker 2 (8:05) Interestingly, after Shang-Chi, I think Kevin Feige is much happier with Shang-Chi than we were because Cretton was handed the keys to the next Avengers film. He was going to direct Avengers The Kang Dynasty. And so that's a huge jump from Shang-Chi to the next major milestone Avengers film. And then the Kang Dynasty went away. It became Doomsday. Cretton was like, I'm going to do something else. He stepped away from that project. And then they're like, how would you like to do Spider-Man? Which I honestly, if I were betting right now, I think is going to outgrow Doomsday. So I think he made a good Speaker 1 (8:47) choice. All I'll say is I've seen most of his work and it's all been okay-ish. I haven't loved any of them. They're dramas. Again, I think you get him. Because he has a unique ability to work with young actors. Not that these actors are young anymore, but you get my point. I feel like these Spider-Man movies are always about young people finding their way in adulthood. And he has made movies that speak to that. Plus, he had a decent legal drama. I don't know if you guys saw Just Mercy. Based on a true story, it had Brie, it had Michael B. Jordan. It was stacked. J.B. Fox is wrongly convicted. You know, I feel like those legal dramas, they're kind of out of fashion. That was a pretty good one a couple years ago. But nothing that I'm seeing is making me feel like it's going to be an incredibly new day. It feels like business as usual at Marvel. And I went into this thing not realizing it was so hyped. But yes, there were showtimes every half hour, I think. Anytime I wanted to see it, this movie was starting up. I did go on Thursday and watched it. Not at IMAX, because it's not there. I watched it in 3D, Real D. Speaker 3 (9:56) Ooh. I just had a basic theater experience. I went to the larger auditorium mid-afternoon Thursday and was surprised at how full it was. It is summer, but I guess I was surprised to see so many youngsters in there. There was teenagers and 20-somethings, and they were all pretty excited for this. And it once again reminded me that, like, oh, yeah, Spider-Man is the comic book movie that people wait for. Speaker 1 (10:19) Families. I saw so many families wearing matching spider shirts. Yeah, I went and Speaker 2 (10:24) saw this twice. I was hyped for it based on that trailer. Now playing devotees who follow our YouTube channel will know that I did a complete trailer breakdown. I actually took an entire day off work just to research which issue of Amazing Spider-Man had that tarantula fight on the cover and who this mysterious villain would be. This movie was shrouded in secrecy. We knew Sadie Sink was in it. We didn't know who she was playing. I stayed offline all day Thursday because I did not want to be spoiled by those jerks who post spoilers within minutes of the movie opening. But as you mentioned, this is not in IMAX. Thanks, Odyssey. Scenes were shot in IMAX ratio, but we'll never get to see that unless they put it on home video. Eh, Speaker 1 (11:14) I mean, eventually. Nolan will lose his screens to that dinosaur suburbia movie in a couple weeks. I'm sure they'll find ways of bringing Spidey back. Speaker 2 (11:23) Odyssey extended its exclusivity to mid-September. Sorry, dinosaur movie. Really? Yeah. They kicked it out of the IMAX? Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:33) There's a giant cardboard cutout saying the end of Oak Street in IMAX. They'll just Sharpie it out. Speaker 2 (11:42) I went to the fan screening of this because if it's not an IMAX, I wanted to see the Dolby laser projection. And that was the quote unquote fan screening where we were supposed to get a gift. I found out the gift that was being given out were Spider-Man socks. Now, I was not impressed with that. A coin, kind of cool. A pin, meh, socks. And then they didn't have the socks. So I paid extra for the fan screening and got nothing extra for that price except the Dolby Digital completely sold out. The showing before mine, not even the fan screening, completely sold out. Mostly 20 and 30 somethings. I didn't see a lot of kids. I did see a lot of Spider-Man fan apparel. There were Spider-Man shirts. The showing before mine, like half the people walking out of there were walking out of there with Spider-Man head popcorn buckets that remind me of the old Halloween buckets we had as a kid. But saw it there, great audience reaction. I could tell they hadn't been spoiled either. But this is the first movie in history to be filmed specifically for the Screen X format. Now, there have been a lot of movies in ScreenX. I guess it premiered in like 2015, somewhere around there, 2018. This is a format that instead of IMAX being super tall, fills 270 degrees of your vision. It has screens on either side, making it super wide and making it feel like you are in the middle of the presentation. For these other movies, they did Top Gun Maverick and they did Fantastic Four First Steps and a bunch of others. They would just CG or film something later or stretch the film to be on the sides. But for this, the company that does Screen X, CJ4Dplex, was on set the entire time. filming sideways to get more cityscape, to get more people on the sides. And so I'm like, all right, if it was filmed for this, I've never seen a Screen X movie before. And it was kind of an interesting setup. Three projectors. They had one projector on each side to project at the walls. The walls were maybe a 15 degree slant to really make it seem like it's pointing towards it. And I noticed a lot technically. The side views during the movie are always soft focus, so they're not going to really draw your attention. They're also dimmer than the main screen. I think that's A, so the projector's light isn't so bright and drawing your attention because the projectors are now in front of you. And also... so that it's not drawing too much of your attention. It got a little weird though, because it's not one contiguous screen. It's three screens with like black bars. So kind of like those old folding phones, you had like black bars in the middle. And when people were like running next to you, they'd get to a certain point and then immediately turn 90 degrees to the left as they're running across. So it kind of reminded me of old video games where people couldn't rotate. They just went and sideways all of a sudden. I actively disliked this gimmick. I did not like this at all. Not every scene had it. The more talky scenes, if it was on a set, basically, if it was in the bodega, if it was in Peter's apartment most of the time, it was not anything on the sides. But if it was an action scene or a montage, they had stuff on the side. And at one point when he was swinging, I actually found myself getting a little motion sick because it was so surrounding me. But... I don't think I'll ever see a 4DX screening again. Whatever I think of the movie, did not like this gimmick. Prefer IMAX or even D-Box over this. Speaker 3 (15:39) So you're saying that when it's not an action scene, it's just blank on those side screens? Yeah, they just basically, Speaker 2 (15:46) the projectors are showing nothing. Speaker 3 (15:47) I think that would drive me nuts. That had to Speaker 1 (15:50) be half of this movie. It was probably a third of the movie, yeah. Wow, that would drive me crazy. Yeah, I would say this movie is pretty light on big thrills. They don't have the big scenes that you're talking about. But montages Speaker 2 (16:02) were also in this, and there's a lot of montages. If there was a rock song or a pop song playing, if there was a needle drop, there was something on the sides. Speaker 1 (16:11) Okay, yeah. In the end, what we're talking about is reasons not to watch movies at home on your phone, right? Which are harder and harder to come by these days. I was thinking Speaker 2 (16:20) part of the reason I went is, again, It's something I'll never be able to get at home. Then I was watching it and I'm thinking, you know what? I could get this on a VR headset. If they wanted to release it on the Meta Quest or on the Apple Vision Pro, you could certainly have that peripheral vision experience and even have it not be so angular and without the lines that this had. So I imagine if VR headsets take off a little bit more, we will be able to have this experience at home. And it might be less annoying than what I experienced. But no, not a fan of it. But I got to see it in the way it was intended, which is always my thing. I like to see the director's intended Speaker 1 (17:02) release format. Okay, I'm hearing the hype. Arnie, you get the plot, and let's find out if it lives up biggest movie of the summer. It's been four years since Speaker 2 (17:12) Aunt May died and Doctor Strange cast a spell to make the multiverse forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. In that time, Peter, played by Tom Holland, has 100 % dove into his Spider-Man life, both literally and figuratively, finding a run-down apartment with a skylight through which he can emerge ready to save the city. In doing so, Spider-Man has become a hero, getting the key to the city, being a champion of the people, and even finding a partner in police detective Gene DeWolf, played by Lisa Colin Zias. But Peter is a reclusive loner with no friends. He keeps up with former girlfriend Mary Jane, played by Zendaya, and Ned Leeds, played by Jacob Batalon, by watching Ned's Instagram videos, which chronicle the two's journey together as friends, attending and eventually graduating from MIT. Peter is also suffering from body aches and headaches seemingly not caused by the physical abuse he takes in his superhero fights. A new mystery occurs when a tank crashes down the New York City streets. Spider-Man tries to stop it, but first has to stop Frank the Punisher Castle, played by Jon Bernthal, who is using lethal methods and explosives to stop the tank. Spider-Man thinks Frank is as dangerous to the innocent civilians in this chase as he is to the tank. The tank ends up crashing into a building run by the Department of Damage Control. But when Spider-Man rips open the tank, he finds the criminal driver inside is an older, innocent-looking woman who is being mind-controlled. The mysterious mentalist hops from body to body in their effort to rescue Mac the Scorpion Gargan, played by Michael Mando, but Spider-Man's spider sense allows him to know who's being controlled. The psychic criminal tries to jump into Spider-Man's mind, but finds themselves blocked by his powers. Spider-Man then meets with the friendly director of damage control, Bill Metzger, played by Trammell Tillman. who says this mysterious criminal has staged several attacks on the organization, and since Spider-Man is both immune to the mind control and able to sense who is possessed, Metzger hopes Spider-Man can stop this supervillain. Spider-Man tries, first visiting Yelena Belova, the new Black Widow played by Florence Pugh, but gets distracted when he randomly encounters Ned in a bodega full of product placements. This movie broke a record with 165 product placements. Peter follows Ned to the new apartment Ned shares with MJ and discovers Ned is fairly obsessed with finding out Spider-Man's secret identity. But Peter gets upset when he sees MJ kiss her boyfriend, an unnamed character played by Iman Esfandi. That night, Peter passes out and wakes up in a cocoon. His AI system, EV, voiced by Nomi Watts, tells him his arachnid DNA has increased and now Peter has uncontrollable spider senses. can shoot organic webs from his wrists, and gets black spider eyes, which puts him in an uncontrollably violent state. Wanting to get back to normal, Peter approaches Dr. Bruce Banner, a college professor now, again played by Mark Ruffalo, who has developed his own superpower suppressor, called an inhibitor, to keep the Hulk in check. With that technology, Peter sets out to make his own, which will suppress his new animalistic spider within him. The psychic confronts Spider-Man, keeping their identity secret by body-hopping while these puppeted New Yorkers give Spider-Man the usual stay-out-of-my-way supervillain speech. Then the baddie, who has broken into Peter Parker's apartment, threatens to hurt MJ if Spider-Man doesn't stand down. Spider-Man goes to rescue MJ, not realizing that his former girlfriend is being mind-controlled. The villain mocks Spider-Man's belief that MJ remembers him at all. Then has MJ attempt suicide by jumping off a rooftop, but Spider-Man saves her. To protect MJ, Spider-Man takes her to the lair of the Punisher. With MJ's scientific knowledge, the two perfect his spider inhibitor, and they create another one that will sap the powers of whoever this psychic is. Peter's video camera lenses also got a glimpse of the psychic, who turns out to be a teenager named Jean Grey, played by Sadie Sink. Gene takes control of the Hulk and again attacks Damage Control, trying to get into a vault looking for an item called V-Max. Spider-Man and Punisher go to stop her, but Punisher's gunfire enrages the Hulk, making both Gene and Banner lose control as Hulk becomes his giant rage monster form, attacking Spider-Man and Punisher. Hulk seems about to kill Spider-Man when Peter appeals to the Bruce inside the Hulk, and Hulk allows himself to be captured. But Jean mind controls Punisher into using his explosives to blow up the door to the vault. Before she can have the Punisher kill Director Metzger, Spider-Man gets the inhibitor on her neck, taking away her powers, and she becomes a prisoner of damage control. But she says a single word to Spider-Man, Sarah. Returning to MJ, Peter discovers she's found the letter he wrote to her four years earlier, telling her they were in love, but her mind's been wiped. So while Peter confesses to still loving her, Not only doesn't she reciprocate, but she doesn't remember any of their time together. Though she takes Spider-Man to her apartment where he spends an afternoon building a Lego X-Wing with Ned, just like the old days. Spider-Man looks into who Sarah was and realizes Metzger has been lying to him. Damage Control has been capturing super-powered people and trying to replicate their powers to create their own super-powered soldiers. Sarah was Jean Grey's older sister, who was also a psychic. She was captured by Damage Control. and died while they experimented on her. Now they have Jean and are doing the same experiments, and Jean realizes V-Max is just the name of the air conditioning vent in their torture chamber that Sarah was looking at when she was killed. Jean gets enraged and her powers grow exponentially. She mind controls a huge radius of New York and finds herself now telekinetic in addition to psychic. Spider-Man goes to stop her non-violently. but Jean mind controls a group of hand ninjas who now work for damage control to attack Spider-Man, as well as troops with special anti-Spider-Man weapons. Spider-Man is overpowered until Peter realizes he has to accept the spider within the man, he destroys his inhibitor, and finally can control his new superpowers, and this leveled-up Spider-Man defeats ninjas and troops with ease. Peter gets to Jean and tries to reason with her, and now the new, more powerful Jean is able to get into Peter's mind and realize the two have a lot in common as super-powered outcasts who lost family members. But Punisher, seeing half the city under Gene's control, has gotten a railgun to snipe Gene. Overkill is underrated. Spider-Man senses the bullet and gets in front of it, taking the hit to save Gene's life. Punisher's bullet almost kills Spider-Man, but Punisher gets him to a hospital that's able to save his life. with help from Jean Grey, who uses her psychic powers to keep Peter alive during the worst of his injuries. Jean leaves New York, while Frank, who now knows Peter Parker's secret identity, becomes closer friends. Peter realizes he doesn't have to be alone to be Spider-Man. He goes and introduces himself to Ned, and when they do their secret bestie handshake, Ned seems to remember his old friendship with Peter as credits roll. And as we start... I love this Marvel logo they do. You know, they used to just be page flips and then it was just the same art. Here, we're getting script shots from No Way Home reminding us of the pact that Peter made where everyone's forgetting him. The Marvel logo's in front of a really detailed Spider-Man mask. We get a quick glimpse of Tobey Maguire. It's getting me in the feels. Speaker 3 (25:02) Yeah, it's also serving to remind us where we are in Spider-Man's life, right? We're seeing memories from these previous movies with Spider-Man being erased, right? We're seeing pictures of him and Ned, and all of a sudden, Peter Parker's no longer in that picture. I think that's a cool little visual way to kind of set the tone in case you haven't gone back and re-watched any of this previous trilogy. Speaker 1 (25:21) Right. The important thing to understand really quickly is the fact that everything is inversed from the last movie. Last movie, everyone knew Peter Parker. And they hated him for it. And this is a movie where everyone knows Spider-Man and nobody knows Parker. He's celebrated. You know, it's four years of him being a crime fighter. And he can be loved as long as nobody knows Peter Parker. And that is an isolation that is difficult for him to manage. And yet it seems Speaker 2 (25:52) a little bit exciting as he's jumping off rooftops. fighting all these criminals. In the very first trailer, they showed all these criminals. They showed Tarantula. They showed Scorpion. They showed Boomerang. And I'm like, oh my God, this is going to be the most Speaker 1 (26:09) packed movie of supervillains ever. Yeah, Speaker 2 (26:12) if you saw the trailer, you saw every frame of Boomerang and of Tarantula. Ramrod. Speaker 1 (26:20) Ramrod, I didn't even know. I don't even know any of these. There was something called Tombstone, I guess, as well. I'd look this up afterwards. Speaker 2 (26:28) Tombstone was in the Spider-Verse movie, and they even got the same voice actor from the Spider-Verse movie who played Tombstone. He was one of Kingsman's henchmen in the first one. They got that same voice actor to do Tombstone in this one. Speaker 3 (26:42) But what they're doing here, which can come off as kind of rote, but I think they're doing it very well here, is they're recreating live action versions of classic comic book covers, right? Like every one of these scenes with these henchmen, you could almost overlay the comic book cover with the shots they're getting here. And Speaker 2 (27:00) it was shot crazy. Apparently these scenes took forever. These aren't just CGI shots. They look like it, but it was filmed. At 420 frames per second, so it could be projected in slow motion absolutely perfectly and get everything right. Apparently, certain shots took 65 takes due to this technology. It just took forever, but it's perfect. I mean, when we see Spider-Man taking out the mobsters and then... swinging with one of them, recreating Spider-Man's very first cover appearance in Amazing Spider-Man 15, where he's holding the guy. It's like they did overlay and Photoshop humans into the art poses. This Speaker 1 (27:44) is the hand. Is this Karigi? This is Elektra, the hand. Speaker 2 (27:48) Yeah, The Hand has long been a Daredevil villain. They shoved it into Elektra the movie, but, you know, Elektra was part of The Hand and a leader of The Hand. And The Hand has come back because Daredevil was part of The Hand. He was taught by Stick, the blind guy, and Stick led The Hand. And so the whole Hand thing has been resolved through the Daredevil television series. And here we just get some. One thing they said was one of my favorite things in life in like the past five years. First are my new dogs. Second is the Spider-Man video games. And these are just incredible. They did one for the PlayStation 4 and then Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2 for the PS5. And in there, you're fighting a bunch of ninjas, you're fighting a bunch of mobsters. And being a Sony game and being a Sony movie, they intentionally brought a lot of those moves into this movie. So when you see them fighting the mobsters and webbing them to the buildings and everything like that, that's straight out of these games that I love. Speaker 1 (28:57) I'm hearing some real enthusiasm for all of these villains and fighting. I've got to say it washes over me real quick. I don't even know who most of these are. And it doesn't feel like the point that Spider-Man is kicking ass. The point feels that crime is down. He's working too much. All that he does is fight crime. And meanwhile, he should be at MIT with MJ and Ned. But instead, he's just got to catch up with them through social media while he's doing all of this. He's missing out on an important part of growing up by doing all of this. And I take this moment, this montage, less as fun and more as drudgery. It's fun if you know the character in the comics because this is just a montage of Easter eggs. It Speaker 2 (29:44) literally is comic cover after comic cover. and C and D level villains who I think Sony have been like, we're never going to make a boomerang villain movie. So let's just throw him in this one scene and be done with him. But you're right. I couldn't believe this montage lasted four or five years. I mean, when No Way Home ended, they were high school seniors and it was Christmas. And now Ned and MJ have graduated MIT. and are back moving back to New York. So they say Peter has been dealing with this for four years, but I think it might be closer to five, which puts this film in 2028 or 2029 because he visits May's tombstone a lot and it shows she died in 2024. So as someone obsessed with the MCU timeline, I'm like, okay, so we're a few years forward. Speaker 3 (30:35) I can totally appreciate what they're doing here. And Stuart, it sounds like it didn't really work on you because you're picking up the pretty heavy theme of the isolation that Peter's feeling and not getting the enjoyment, the juxtaposition that the filmmakers are giving us, the fans, of like, oh, hey, look at how cool all of this stuff is on screen. And it's also being balanced with that isolation that Peter's going through. Speaker 1 (30:58) Well, I love the band TV on the radio, so they're jamming Wolf Like Me. And I noticed that Spidey is partnering with the NYPD. This feels new. Again, we don't have any J. Jonah Jamesons. We don't have any authorities that say we hate this Spider-Man. Everyone loves Spider-Man. That's been rectified. And we have this Detective DeWolf, Wolf Like Me. Is this a comic book character? Is this someone that will be turned into something super in the future? This is not a spoiler Speaker 2 (31:27) for a movie because God only knows what they'll do with her, but Gene DeWolf is a comic character. Peter has partnered with a lot of cops in the past. He's partnered with a cop in the Spider-Man games. But Gene DeWolf, I know specifically because Peter David, one of my favorite comic writers, one of my favorite novelists, wrote a comic called The Death of Gene DeWolf in which a not super-powered psychopath called the Sin Eater, was committing homicides and killed this longtime cop partner of Spider-Man's. I can't imagine the next movie would go so dark as to bring in this Zodiac-type killer that is not superpowered to kill Gene DeWolf and all these other people in very violent, dark means. But that's what I know Gene DeWolf from is her death. Speaker 1 (32:20) I know this actress from The Bear, she's one of the charming supporting players that makes food on that show. I guess it just recently ended. I haven't watched the last season, but I've noticed the new characters seem to be populated from appointment television. The villain in this movie is from Severance as well. That's how I'm connecting with this movie. You guys are seeing comic book covers. I'm being reminded of episodes of TV I need to watch. Speaker 2 (32:45) She was there with Punisher, right? I saw some photos of people posting scenes from The Bear, and it was like, I don't remember this scene in the movie, because it looks like Punisher and Gene DeWolf are just Speaker 1 (32:57) chatting. Yeah, Bernthal very briefly is in that series. I wouldn't say he's a featured player. He's dead. I'll just spoil that. He's dead at the start of it. Speaker 3 (33:05) Well, now Speaker 1 (33:05) I'll never watch it. Thanks. Speaker 3 (33:09) We get the theme of this movie. thrown at us pretty quickly here, right? Like it's going to be action-packed to some degree, but also it's really not about that. It's going to be about Peter figuring out what he's going to do as he graduates into adulthood now, right? We've had teenage Peter for all these years and now we're skipping ahead five years. It's time to grow up and make decisions about what adulthood looks like. Speaker 2 (33:30) Oh, what's scary to me is I was thinking, oh my God, you just can't take tech away from Spider-Man. People always complained. Spider-Man was Iron Man Jr. in those previous movies because he had all the Stark tech. He had all the super suits. And here, when we see him, he's got this similar to Tuesday or similar to Jarvis AI talking to him and helping him analyze stuff. And I'm like, it's still Iron Man. Then I'm like, wait, this is just chat GPT. This is stuff we actually have. And it kind of freaked me out that like. When Iron Man came out 18 years ago, this was revolutionary sci-fi, and now we live with it. It would be worse if Peter Parker Speaker 1 (34:15) didn't use this tech. I also think it's important that there's this female voice in his head, right? Because Marissa Tomei is also going to be in this. She's not the voice of this AI. For some reason, they've given it to Naomi Watts. What's that about? I don't know. I think the fact that we had stories about his father figures. Now we're going to be thinking about Aunt May, I think, in this movie and the legacy that she left him. But put a pin in that. We've got a stolen tank driving down Manhattan streets. This is the inciting incident that is going to bring