‘SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY’ Proves That Superhero Fatigue Is Real. It’s Just Not What You Think.

For about five years now, the internet’s favorite armchair diagnosis has been “superhero fatigue.” We’re all familiar with the bit. Every underperforming cape movie gets the same postmortem: audiences are DONE, the genre is COOKED, the well is DRY, Kevin Feige should salt the earth and move onto greener pastures. We’ve all been writing the obituary for so long that the obituary has its own obituary. And it felt, for a while, entirely plausible. If not outright inevitable. Movies like The Eternals, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps all disappointed expectations to outright bombed at the box office. Endless, second-rate streaming spinoffs asked us to do homework for movies no one wanted in the first place. The whole enterprise started to feel less like an event and more like a subscription you kept forgetting to cancel. And then: Spider-Man returned.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to $360 million domestic. Not “good for a superhero movie.” Not “solid given the headwinds.” The biggest opening weekend in the history of the medium, dethroning Avengers: Endgame, a movie that had a decade of runway and the emotional payoff of a dozen films behind it. $927 million globally, second-largest worldwide debut ever. People didn’t just show up. They stampeded. They set records for Dolby and 4DX and ScreenX. Cornering the premium markets even when IMAX was still largely devoted to Chris Nolan and his Odyssey.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Tom Holland]

The easy read here, that fatigue was a myth, the genre’s fine, we were all being dramatic, is wrong. The genre is not fine. Most of what Marvel has shoveled out since Endgame has earned every ounce of the exhaustion aimed at it. This isn’t a vindication tour.

What Brand New Day actually proved is narrower and a lot more damning. Audiences aren’t tired of heroes. They’re done leaving the house for dreck and repetition. The fatigue is real. It’s just pointed at the leftovers, not the character.

Because, and I say this as the guy who reviewed it, Brand New Day isn’t some masterclass in storytelling. I caught it on a massive Dolby screen where some of the compositing looked pretty unfinished but it has undeniable elements of craft and buildup. Destin Daniel Cretton stages action you can actually follow. There’s a real score. There’s a genuine idea underneath it – the spider slowly eating the man and the weight of isolation – that the movie is actually about. And there’s no end-credits homework demanding you show up for the next six things. It’s the first MCU movie in forever that’s enjoyable in itself. They cleared a bar that’s embarrassingly low and got rewarded with the biggest opening in cinema history. Mr. Feige should with how starved people had to be for that math to work.

And look at what they paid for. Not convenience. You can stream this into your living room in six weeks or so on your TV on D+. What they lined up and paid a premium for was scale. The big screen. The booming sound. The eventification of it all. They’ll drop twenty-plus dollars, but only for something that demands the house. Something that would be actively diminished shrunk down to a laptop, that flat-out won’t play as well on Netflix.

Which is exactly what Ryan Gosling said months ago, after the success of Project Hail Mary: “It is not your job to keep [theaters] open. It is our job to make things that make it worth your while to come out.” That’s the whole ballgame. The burden isn’t on the faithful to keep trudging out of loyalty alone. It’s on the filmmakers to build something worth doing that odyssey for.

Look who else cornered the premium rooms this summer: Mr. Nolan’s The Odyssey. I’m no Nolan disciple. The man’s tendency to proselytize his movie’s themes makes for a brand of smart movies for dumb people (or maybe dumb movies for smart people) that just happens to do gangbusters at the BO. But The Odyssey understood the assignment. Cyclopes, sirens, a Trojan Horse dragged into frame on actual 70mm, built to swallow the biggest screen you could find. Not a flawless film but it doesn’t matter. Its spectacle the living room physically cannot reproduce, and audiences once again left the couch. The same lesson should be the takeaway, despite being a different genre.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Odyssey’ directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Tom Holland]

Now hold all of that against the other thing that happened this summer, two weeks earlier, from the same studio that made Spider-Man. On July 20th, Marvel dropped the first Avengers: Doomsday trailer, and within hours the discourse split, and neither half was the one Marvel wanted. VFX shots dismissed as “AI slop.” And the killer read: it felt “like things happening with no buildup.” Nostalgia doing every ounce of the heavy lifting. It’s dreck and repetition wearing a $400 million coat, and audiences clocked it in an afternoon. Feige’s response, that we’re all misremembering how good the Thanos buildup was, is not the flex he thinks it is. When your rebuttal to “you didn’t do the work” is “you’re wrong about the last time we did,” you’ve conceded the argument.

So here’s the much too-late lesson to be learned in the Doomsday run-up. The record Spider-Man just set is not a green light to coast on the shared universe. It’s a warning shot. The appetite is enormous but the patience for dreck is gone. People will move heaven and earth and a Tuesday night for something built with craft and shown at scale. They’ll book tickets to premium formats months in advance if they think it’ll be worth it. But they’ll also tweet en mass that your next big thing trailer is crap if it indeed does resemble crap. And no brand association can change that.

The audience isn’t tired of heroes per se. It’s discerning. Smart. And they increasingly are grading on craft. A feeling of reality and weight to the unreality on our screens. Give it something built for the room and it’ll stampede past every obituary we ever wrote. Give it leftovers under a familiar logo and it’ll do what any of us would when a movie stops respecting our time. They’ll simply wait until it drops on streaming.

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