How Destin Daniel Cretton Brought Spider-Man Back To Earth
From VFX to costume design, reflective moments to swinging solo, director Destin Daniel Cretton made Peter Parker feel real again in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
There are a handful of things everyone associates with Spider-Man: He lives a double life as the dorky Peter Parker and the friendly neighborhood superhero; he is perpetually broke, he’s a certified genius, he has a disastrous romantic life, and of course, he’s been saddled with “great responsibility.” It’s these elements that make Spider-Man the ultimate relatable superhero for fans over the decades. And some combination of these elements has been present in every cinematic iteration of the webslinger — though, for Sony’s Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man movies led by Tom Holland, it took a few detours to get there.
And now, in a sense, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the most popular Marvel hero of all time is, once again, getting a movie that is focused just on him. Inverse caught up with the director of Brand New Day, Destin Daniel Cretton, to learn just how you make a standalone Spidey movie feel, well, like a brand new idea. The key? Spidey is solo this time. “He has to do everything on his own,” Cretton says.
“It really is back to basics.”
Since his introduction in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Holland’s Spider-Man has consistently shared the spotlight with, if not been in the shadow of, other adult superheroes. He was introduced to the MCU under the wing of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), hoping to add to his team’s numbers in the battle against Captain America. And over Spider-Man’s next few solo movies, Tony Stark has acted as a mentor, sponsor, and later, guiding force, for the young hero. Even after Tony’s demise, Holland’s Spider-Man found himself with superheroic (or villainous) mentors to aspire to — like Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio in Far From Home and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange (as well as, ironically, Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin) in No Way Home.
But the events of No Way Home changed everything. The 2021 movie erased Peter Parker from everyone’s memories, leaving Spider-Man, for the first time, on his own. Brand New Day, the fourth solo movie for Holland’s Spider-Man, picks up four years later, with Peter Parker truly grappling with that solitude.
“Everything about this movie is stemming from the fact that Peter is alone for really the first time in his life — truly, truly alone,” Cretton tells Inverse. “He doesn’t have a Tony Stark to lean on. He doesn’t have somebody to make him a tech suit and hand it to him...So it really is back to basics.”
Spider-Man may be thriving, but Peter Parker is at one of his lowest points.
So what are the true, essential basics for Spider-Man? Is it the costume he sews himself? The juggling of multiple low-paid jobs just to pay for his crappy apartment and fund his vigilante lifestyle? The yearning for his ultimate true love, MJ? Per Stan Lee, who co-created Spider-Man with artist Steve Ditko, it may not be a checklist of things people have come to expect with Spider-Man (which Brand New Day does fulfill a few of), but just his general relatability itself. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1996, Lee said Spider-Man is “the one who’s most like me — nothing ever turns out 100 percent OK; he’s got a lot of problems, and he does things wrong, and I can relate to that.”
Things are certainly not all rosy for Peter Parker in Brand New Day. Spider-Man’s career is thriving — he’s regularly catching bad guys like Tombstone, Scorpion, and The Hand; crime is down; and he just got handed the keys to the city. He’s, for all intents and purposes, that “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” that we know and love. “He has both feet on the ground. He has a lot more street-level villains that he’s fighting throughout this movie. It all takes place in New York City,” Cretton says.
But Peter Parker’s life is, well, non-existent. Brand New Day reveals that Peter never revealed his true identity to his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and true love MJ (Zendaya) as he promised them, instead choosing to watch them from the shadows (or more accurately, from Ned’s frequent Instagram updates). His life consists of updating his costume — which yes, he sews himself — putting away bad guys, and visiting his Aunt May’s grave. If he’s hankering to call someone, he’ll chat with police detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) about crime statistics. But he has no real life of his own.
Peter Parker is more alone than ever.
“It was just a natural progression of where the last movie left off. I think that it left off with a very big question,” Cretton says. “‘Where is Peter Parker now? Who is Peter when he doesn't have Ned and MJ around him, when he doesn't have his Aunt May?’ And he really tries to be that person who could be isolated and be alone and take on the weight of protecting everybody in New York City. He believes that what Aunt May told him, with great power must also come great responsibility. He believes that the definition of that is to be a vigilante who has one sole purpose to just work and take care of people. The reality is that I think what Aunt May was telling him also included a responsibility to himself that at the beginning of our movie, he just doesn’t quite understand that.”
So that’s how Brand New Day finds Peter Parker consumed by his work and lonelier than ever. It was this starting point for Peter that drew Cretton — who took the reins after Jon Watts directed the first three solo Spidey films — to direct Brand New Day.
“I think it’s something that I think many of us might be feeling right now.”
“The place where Peter Parker is in his life at the beginning of this movie, I think it’s something that I think many of us might be feeling right now or at least have gone through a stage in life,” Cretton says, “where you had to say goodbye to a loved one or you have experienced some type of tragedy.”
He continues, “And I think for me, the temptation is to shut people out in those moments or to feel like nobody else would understand or nobody else would know the emotions that you’re feeling. And sometimes for me, the answer is ‘I’m just going to work, and I’m done with relationships. I’m done with feeding the human side of me, and I’m just going to work.’”
Spider-Man reunites with MJ for the first time in years.
But that’s just part of Peter’s journey in Brand New Day. “Every character that comes into his life over the course of this movie is showing him a different side to this subject,” Cretton teases. That includes the unseen villain of the piece: a mysterious invisible force that earns Peter’s attention after a flashy breakout at the Department of Damage Control (DODC). This force seems to hop from body to body, unseen, but Peter is able to sense it thanks to his powers. And he has a strange immunity to this unseen threat too, able to resist this force attempting to take over his mind. Cretton was naturally tight-lipped on what this sinister force was, but did say that depicting an invisible threat proved a unique technical challenge, especially as he and his team sought to bring the more “grounded” emotionality of Spider-Man’s story arc to every aspect of the film.
“Everything that we were doing was trying to make the most grounded movie as possible,” Cretton says. “Every department had kept using that word, grounded.”
But what is a practical, “grounded” way of showing an invisible force? Cretton and company didn’t want to overly rely on VFX to show the invisible villain’s unique power of body hopping. “We wanted to try to imagine what it could be, if I had the power to hop into your brain or hop into anybody in this room, what that transition might look like,” Cretton says.
“Tom always has input and I found it all very good. He came in early into the process and was in the writers room with us pitching ideas,” Cretton says of his star.
The solution was, surprisingly, dance. Cretton hired friend and dance choreographer Nathan Kim, who carefully sketched out the ways people’s bodies would contort and twist once they’re possessed. “There’s a lot of very meticulously coordinated choreographed body movement that allows you to visually see this mysterious villain at work,” Cretton says.
Kim is not the only friend that Cretton called upon to help make that “grounded” approach a reality. He brought on Shang-Chi fight choreographer Peng Zhang to give the action design and stunts some extra heft. “Our goal was to capture as much in camera as possible,” Cretton says. “So we have some of the best stunt performers in the world in this movie and some of the best action designers.”
“Every department had kept using that word, grounded.”
This largely practical approach can be seen in an early set piece in which Cretton and crew drove a real tank through the streets of New York. But it can also be seen in some of Spider-Man’s swinging scenes, as well as the fights, of course. Cretton teases “some very amazing choreographed fights at the end of the third act of this movie.”
“Everything was attempted to be captured in-camera,” Cretton says. “And of course we also have an amazing VFX team to help with taking what was captured in camera and expanding it to a grand scale.”
