It was just two weekends ago when Tom Holland, his wife Zendaya and Jon Bernthal starred in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a blockbuster destined to be one of the biggest billion-dollar hits of the year. And now the trio are already back on the big screen tomorrow in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a Marvel sequel set to rival the $2.7 billion box office behemoth Avengers: Endgame, if analysts’ predictions are to be believed. Talk about a young Hollywood couple at the top of their game!

Holland’s record fourth solo movie as the Web Slinger arrives five years after Spider-Man: No Way Home’s multiverse-spanning shenanigans, with former Peter Parker stars Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield showing up alongside five villains from their movies, in a gargantuan nostalgia-filled fan service extravaganza. The 2021 movie concluded with Holland’s Peter having to make a terrible choice for Doctor Strange to cast a spell that everyone, including his loved ones like Zendaya’s MJ, would forget him and Spider-Man would become anonymous once again.

Brand New Day introduces us to an isolated Peter, who is just getting on with being a friendly neighbour Spider-Man. With Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton’s help, Marvel fans are introduced to a much more grounded, New York City crime-fighting Spidey, a bold and smart move to follow up on the sheer scale of No Way Home.

It’s refreshingly back-to-basics, with Holland admitting he researched what fans wanted from a new Spider-Man film from Reddit forums and pitching ideas to Sony. Aside from taking on the likes of Michael Mando’s Scorpion (a character teased in an end credits scene a decade ago), Peter is desperately lonely and mourning the loss of his friendship with Ned and girlfriend MJ. Having lost his parents, aunt, uncle and multiple father figures like Tony Stark across his Marvel movies, you’d think the kid deserved a break?

Peter finds only a surface of fatherly solace in Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner and Bernthal’s Punisher, as Brand New Day focuses much more on Spider-Man as a person rather than the mission or villains he’s taking on. It’s an incredibly emotional and mature film compared to previous outings, in part because he’s grown into a man who’s now very much on his own post-High School. At the film’s core is Peter’s struggle with grief and trauma, something he shares with the Punisher under his rough exterior, and, it turns out, with Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink in her excellent performance as the film’s spoilerific antagonist.

While it’s refreshing to follow up the bombastic external stakes of No Way Home with a more grounded, introspective story, there’s still plenty of what Marvel does best on the action side of things. Spider-Man’s skyscraper fight scene with the Hulk in his classic form (something not seen in the MCU for over a decade), was a particularly thrilling highlight, while Florence Pugh’s Yelena provides her usual eccentric comic one-liners. Whether or not Holland’s Spider-Man will feature in Avengers Doomsday later this year, though, is anyone’s guess, but you can bet he’s not hanging up his superhero suit anytime soon.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits UK cinemas on Wednesday.