Spider-Man is doing what only a spider can, breaking box office records the likes of which no individual superhero has seen before. If Marvel Studios wants to replicate this success with its X-Men reboot, it will need to recognize what exactly has made Spider-Man: Brand New Day such a hit.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day proves Marvel’s X-Men should put its mutants over spectacle
After the spectacle in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was seeing all three live-action Spider-Mans together on the big screen for the first time, Brand New Day recentered the franchise back onto Tom Holland’s iteration. Having waited five years, audiences were ready to see Spider-Man swing his way back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Brand New Day gave audiences something that we have been wanting to see since Homecoming: the return of the street-level Spider-Man. The movie may spend a considerable amount of time on Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey (to its detriment), but otherwise it’s the best of Holland’s Spider-Mans in terms of how much it actually focuses on the character and what he’s going through.
This is exactly what Marvel Studios needs to take away from Spider-Man: Brand New Day for X-Men. Mutant powers can be extremely cool to show on screen, but if audiences cannot connect with the title team and feel the struggles they are going through, then it’ll be all for naught.
I’m not the first one to point out that the MCU lost its way with the Multiverse Saga. Character development was put on the back burner in favor of teasing future incursions and the incoming threat of Kang Doctor Doom. While there are outliers, Loki being one, most of the projects would have been better off if the multiverse had been removed from the story.
So, with that said, Marvel Studios needs to focus on the mutants’ personal relationships first and foremost to create something compelling with its X-Men reboot. This movie doesn’t need a gimmick like Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom or all three Spider-Mans fighting together.
This movie needs to make us care about these new X-Men.
No other superhero team in Marvel comics faces the sort of struggles and prejudice that the X-Men do. This needs to be a major part of the upcoming reboot. Thankfully, based on where Brand New Day left Jean Grey, it seems that Marvel Studios is laying the groundwork for Jean’s actions to possibly be labeled the first “mutant attack” in the MCU.
After Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel needs to fully ditch the spectacle and gimmicks. We need to return to the early days of the MCU when the studio made us care about a billionaire in an iron suit, a super soldier fighting nazis, and a god who needed to learn humility.
X-Men can follow Brand New Day in leading the next wave of character-driven MCU movies. It would be a major improvement after so many spectacle-over-substance movies during the Multiverse Saga.
Originally written by Lee Freitag at SuperHeroHype