Brand New Day trailer teases Tom Holland’s Dark Knight turn

Everyone in Hollywood has Christopher Nolan envy. Why wouldn’t they? While studios leverage any IP imaginable to craft a hit — get pumped for that Labubu movie from the director of Paddington — the director of Inception, Interstellar, and a few Batman movies has turned himself into his own marketable brand. Thanks to the power of IMAX film stock and two decades of self-mythologizing on the wonders of on-set stunt work, Nolan can make a three-hour J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic a box-office bonanza that competes with a Barbie movie. Everyone wants a piece of that, even Marvel.

On Thursday, Marvel and Sony Pictures released a short non-trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day that emphasizes just how much action to expect from this fourth installment. And not just action: Shot on the street, explosions in the background, aerial wire-fu action with stunts that pack enough kick to give star Tom Holland a concussion. We will not see the Cirque du Soleil version of Brand New Day in theaters, with digital effects connecting all the dots and erasing all the rigging, but with enough practical elements it should rise well above the expectations of what Marvel often delivers on the setpiece front. (Sorry, Punisher.)

In an era where every type of entertainment is eroding the theatrical experience, from TV to video games to YouTube to Tiktok to the next great hyper-shortform content mill, movie studios are pitching their tentpoles with a greater emphasis on reality than ever before. That isn’t slowing down the pipeline for $200 million live-action cartoons pitched at Gen X nostalgia but some tunes have changed. At this year’s Cinema Con, Warner Bros. launched a specialty distribution brand, Clockwork, with a mission of filmmaker-forward fare. Its first big swing is a re-release of Ken Russell’s cut of The Devils. Not exactly a four-quadrant operation, but a hint that there’s still a hope that film grain and practical craft have a place in Hollywood. Maybe Seth Rogan’s The Studio got under executives’ skin.

But I see this more as Nolan’s profound impact on what movies can be and how they speak to mass audiences. Nolan will face a test with The Odyssey, which despite being made by the guy who brought us Heath Ledger’s Joker, a dude bro icon, is being attacked for “woke” casting by Guys Who Have Stopped Thinking About the Roman Empire For One Day to Critique a Greek Epic. I still think Nolan bests them all through by building big ships and letting Matt Damon swing a sword on an actual Greek island. The rest of the industry seems to think he’s got the juice, no matter what. (And Holland must agree, as he stars in both Brand New Day and The Odyssey this summer.)

Nolan didn’t invent practical-effects-heavy filmmaking, but as I’ve written, Interstellar rewired how Hollywood talks about it. Nolan’s mix of giant miniatures and projected space environments created a modern sci-fi aesthetic that still feels weirdly unmatched more than a decade later. That influence popped up again this month around Project Hail Mary, when co-director Christopher Miller proudly declared the movie used “no green screen whatsoever,” immediately setting off a small online firestorm among VFX artists, who understandably pointed out that a giant space movie featuring alien characters does not materialize out of thin air.

Miller later clarified that the film absolutely used visual effects, but like Nolan on Interstellar, the production prioritized practical sets before layering in digital work from studios like ILM and Framestore. Even still, filmmakers are chasing the Nolan blueprint, trying to capture that elusive Interstellar feeling — or in the case of Brand New Day, that Inception/Tenet/The Dark Knight feeling — where fantasy occupies actual space instead of floating through a CG soup.

Is Destin Daniel Cretton a filmmaker on par with Nolan? Brand New Day may be the way to judge, but between the fight choreography on Shang-Chi and the grounded superhero logic of Wonder Man, he’s steering the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a more realistic direction than the Russo Brothers ever could or would. The real coup would be making a name for himself under the umbrella of Brand New Day. Spider-Man swinging in the actual streets of London looks frickin’ awesome, but I wonder what Cretton would do with $100 million and free reign to make his dream project a la Inception. That’s where Nolan still can’t be beat.