New Spider-Man Director Has Already Fixed Marvel’s Biggest Mistake

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 15 seconds ago

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a new chapter for everyone’s favorite web-head. In addition to a plot that teams him up with everyone from Bruce Banner to the Punisher, Tom Holland’s Spidey finally has a new director calling the shots. While his previous three films were directed by Jon Watts, this latest adventure is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. He’s a known quantity, having previously directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Still, it’s a big leap from Shang-Chi to Marvel’s most popular hero, and many fans are understandably nervous about whether Cretton can stick the landing.

If you’re similarly skeptical, you might be reassured by the latest update from the director. In a recent interview with Time Magazine, he discussed that one of his biggest goals with Brand New Day was to capture as much of the action on-camera via practical stunts rather than adding things later via special effects. Honestly, it’s a great approach to capturing the sheer physicality of Spider-Man, which can be downright hypnotic if done right. Even more importantly, it’s an approach that can fix Marvel’s biggest problem: ruining cool moments with some of the worst CGI known to man.

Making Everything Feel More Real

In a recent interview with Time, Destin Daniel Cretton opened up about his creative approach to Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This included frequently asking Tom Holland to do things that “seemed impossible” and “felt almost ridiculous” to ask for. Without complaint, the Spider-Man actor would always pull off the stunt. This pleasantly surprised Cretton, who had made his own moves to ensure the film had killer onscreen action. “We brought a lot of our stunt team from Shang-Chi onto the project,” he said. “The goal was to try to get as much in camera as we possibly could.”

Why was this approach so important to Cretton, though? “One of the draws to doing this Spider-Man movie was that we are seeing Spider-Man go back to basics. We’re seeing a street-level Spider-Man, and we wanted that to be across the board,” he said. “We kept talking about this idea of a ‘grounded movie.’ We were taking that mentality into the stunts, into the action design, to see Spider-Man doing things that feel almost possible and not to rely as heavily on VFX.”

Bad CGI? Marvel Can Do This All Day

This is an excellent way to handle Spider-Man, a character who historically protects a single city rather than the entire world. Grounded stunts play into the idea that Brand New Day will have the hero fighting without the benefit of any fancy technology from Tony Stark. Capturing Tom Holland doing killer stunts on his own instead of sprucing everything up with special effects is a great way to emphasize the physicality of the role and of Spider-Man. It’s also an awesome way of fixing Marvel’s biggest mistake: namely, ruining otherwise great movies with crappy effects!

The most infamous example of this is Bruce Banner in the Hulkbuster armor from Avengers: Infinity War. It’s a nearly perfect Marvel movie (exceeded only by Endgame), but it’s impossible to think about this film without remembering Mark Ruffalo’s head just floating above that armor like something out of a bad video game cutscene. Similarly, the first Black Panther (which is an absolute masterpiece of worldbuilding) is marred by a fight between BP and Killmonger that transforms the movie into a fighting game with crappy CGI. Thor: Love and Thunder featured a floating head effect that was so bad it had to be fixed before the Disney+ release.

The list goes on, including a bad cartoon-looking version of Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok and some genuinely WTF transformation sequences in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. With Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Destin Daniel Cretton is addressing this issue head-on by embracing practical stunts and eschewing fancy VFX or crappy CGI whenever possible. Considering that this movie might earn closer to $2 billion than $1 billion, future franchise films are likely to follow the director’s lead in search of their own success. In this way, Cretton may do something even Spider-Man couldn’t do: save Marvel from ruining its own films with effects as cheap as they are ugly!