Tom Holland stood on set on the first day of production for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and admitted something that stopped the crew in its tracks. ‘Putting the suit on feels different this time, somehow,’ he said, and that feeling was not accidental. For everyone who has followed Peter Parker through a decade of Marvel films, the question of what comes next after the memory-erasing spell of the previous installment carries real emotional weight. This was day one of Holland’s fourth Spider-Man production, and for the first time, fans were on set to witness it.
A suit stitched together from three Spider-Men
The new costume became the physical expression of everything the story needed to say. The design team went back to the moment in No Way Home when Holland’s Peter met Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s versions of the same character, and asked a direct question: what if the suit was a homage to all three? Holland described the approach as going back to ‘that dumpster diver kid who’s retrofitting old tech,’ and the result is a costume the production calls a spider child of all three designs. The suit embraces folds and wrinkles rather than hiding them, so that when it moves, the human body beneath the material is visible. The simplicity is the point.
That tactile quality fed directly into one of the film’s most technically demanding sequences. To recreate iconic comic book covers, cinematographers shot at 420 frames per second. Holland had to execute what the team described as a perfect uppercut reverse swan dive while being physically yanked upward toward the camera. He hit the required pose in two or three takes, which one crew member called ‘a real awakening to how much control he has over every muscle in his body.’
Jon Bernthal and the big brother Holland never had on screen
The emotional center of the production shifted the moment Jon Bernthal arrived. The two actors have history that predates any camera. Bernthal put it plainly on set: ‘Tom made my first Punisher audition tape and I made his first Spider-Man audition tape, and if anybody could have told us then that we’d be here now, I just think we’d be so thrilled.’
What neither of them anticipated was how the dynamic between their characters would evolve once filming began. What started as scripted scenes became, in Bernthal’s words, a ‘really funny big brother little brother type relationship’ that director Destin Daniel Cretton let run without interruption. The chemistry was consistent enough that Cretton made a standing decision to keep cameras rolling between takes, because moments that could not be replicated kept appearing in the gaps.
The villain in Brand New Day presented a separate creative challenge. The antagonist has the ability to jump from person to person, and the production wanted to visualize that without relying on visual effects. Choreographer Nathan Kim was brought in and given a group of dancers and a few days to explore body movement with no predetermined outcome. What came out of those sessions became the physical language of the film’s central threat.
The friend who tracked Spider-Man anyway
Zendaya and Jacob Batalon return as MJ and Ned, freshly graduated from college and building lives in New York without any memory of Peter Parker. Batalon noted that Ned has developed ‘a weird feeling of a missing link’ between himself and Spider-Man and, in his words, ‘decides to track Spider-Man, no matter how creepy that sounds.’
Batalon laughed delivering that line. The audience probably will too.
When Holland slipped back into the suit on that first morning, fans on set screamed. He looked around, acknowledged the familiar faces, and said he was going to do his best and hope to get it right. Ten years in, and the nerves were still real.
