Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Marvel
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is on the verge of breaking an MCU earnings record previously set by Avengers: Endgame with its day one numbers, which could be higher than $70 million on a single Thursday. If it wasn’t clear before, it is now that Spider-Man is the single most important superhero Marvel has, and as such, the studio is going to figure out a way to maximize that further. That, it would seem, lead to the arrival of a second Spider-Man, without the disappearance of the other.
That would be Miles Morales, another Spider-Man that was first introduced in the comics back in 2011. Since then, he’s had starring roles in video games and an incredible run of animated Spider-Verse movies, but has yet to make a live-action MCU appearance. Tom Holland indicates that’s about to change in new Brand New Day promotional interviews:
“We’re not going anywhere,” Holland says. “As long as the movies keep working, all I’ll say is the process of passing the baton is in motion. That will happen. How it will happen, we don’t know, but it is something that we’re working on.”
That baton passing would imply that Miles would replace Peter Parker as the MCU Spider-Man, as when you pass a baton, two people are not still holding on to the baton after that. But that seems contrary to other statements from both Holland and Marvel itself, which indicate that Holland will also play the character indefinitely.
Sony’s Amy Pascal told Collider that “We hope Tom’s going to be our Spider-Man forever.” And while previously Holland said that if he was still playing Spider-Man when he’s 30, he’d done something wrong, now actually age 30 and possibly about to star in one of the highest-grossing films ever, if early numbers are any indication, he’s changed his tune. “Playing Spider-Man has been the joy of my life. I now kind of stand on the plinth of like, I’ll do it for as long as they’ll have me,” he said in press for Brand New Day.
It is pretty clear exactly what will happen here. The MCU will in fact introduce Miles Morales in live-action as a second Spider-Man. This will undoubtedly start with a Peter/Miles crossover film in some capacity, before Miles and Peter both start making their own movies. Perhaps with cameos in each others’, but the point being, Sony and Marvel can now double their Spider-Man film output. Even if the Miles films don’t put up the sort of insane numbers as the Peter films, if they can attract even a portion of that audience, that means they’re doing better than most other MCU films in this era. It’s easy to think that Marvel will want either a Peter or Miles Spider-movie every other year or so, once they have two of them to play with.
I certainly am thinking of Captain America right now, which was a true “baton passing” from Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers to Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson. That did not work, however, with Mackie’s Brave New World solo film underperforming critically and commercially, and of course, we now see Evans’ Rogers being brought back in Avengers: Doomsday alongside Sam’s Cap, which feels like a bit of an emergency ripcord.
I think Holland is simply using the wrong terminology about baton-passing here. It would make zero sense for Holland to abandon the part or for Marvel and Sony to want him to. But it also stands to reason that the popular Miles Morales should also enter the MCU at some point as a potentially great new character, and more importantly, a good earner for the universe. That may take a number of years to come to pass, but it’s clearly the road we’re on now.
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