Spider-Man is successfully reinvented after No Way Home

The latest Spider-Man adventure takes place four years after Spiderman: No Way Home and finds the webslinger a workaholic crimefighter anonymously protecting New York City.  Photo by Matthew Towers

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By his own admission, following up the mammoth success of Spider-Man: No Way Home is something that might petrify most movie executives.

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But Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has a blueprint for superhero films that extends through 2042, so that made the idea of pursuing a fourth Spidey movie easier to wrap his head around.

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“No Way Home was a big success and it is very easy to be paralyzed by that kind of success,” Feige concedes in a video interview from New York City. “It’s a testament to this team that if we were paralyzed it only lasted a year or two, and then we got into what is the best new fresh story to tell.”

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Now playing in theatres, Spider-Man: Brand New Day takes place four years after No Way Home and finds Tom Holland’s Peter Parker now a workaholic crimefighter anonymously protecting New York City.

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With their memories of Peter scrubbed by Doctor Strange at the end of No Way Home, his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) don’t know who he is as he works in relative obscurity.

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No Way Home earned close to $2 billion worldwide (it made $800 million in North America alone), so taking Spider-Man in a mature direction was a necessary step.

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“The fact that we decided to make him anonymous at the end of No Way Home was a risky thing to do because it certainly was working. But what we wanted to do was put him back in that classic Spider-Man dilemma where nobody knows who he is and yet he still has to keep going,” longtime Spider-Man series producer Amy Pascal says.

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Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who also helmed Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Brand New Day represents a continuation of Spider-Man stories on the big screen that goes back to 2002.

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Pascal and Feige have been involved with the franchise from the start. Before the character joined Marvel’s ongoing cinematic universe in 2016 when Holland cameoed as the wallcrawler in Captain America: Civil War, Pascal produced the first five live-action Spider-Man movies that starred Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.

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Sony, which owns the cinematic rights to the character, partnered with Marvel Studios to integrate Spidey alongside other Marvel heroes a decade ago.

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“It happened because it was the right thing to do for Peter Parker,” Pascal now says.

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Spider-Man movie veterans Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers pen the new instalment, which adds a smorgasbord of heroes to the mix, including Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Jon Bernthal as Punisher, as well as two notable surprises, one of whom is played by Stranger Things star Sadie Sink.

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The body-hopping villain is the film’s biggest secret, but they’re unlike anything the webslinger has gone up against.

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Below, Pascal and Feige spoke more about the challenge of turning Spider-Man into a crime-fighting loner and why Marvel no longer has a blueprint when it comes to planning its upcoming film slate.