The trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day dropped this morning. Normally I shy away from jumping in on the online conversation (I mentioned this a few posts back when the Lanterns trailer dropped) but I thought it might be worth a shot to actually weigh in because I was surprised at my reaction to what Marvel showed us.

For context, I have enjoyed all of the MCU Spider-Man films. I have quibbles here and there, but for the most part each of the films had at least one scene where my reaction was, “That was really well done.”

My only real problem with this version of Spider-Man is that something has always felt off about it. I will admit that I am no expert on the character. I am not the Spider-Man fan that some of my friends are, but I have a sense of who Peter Parker is or, at the very least, who I feel he should be. Having Peter essentially be the protege to Iron Man and have access to all of this awesome tech doesn’t jibe with the struggling to make rent, barely has enough money to make web fluid version that I am more familiar with. I realize that there have been plenty of times in the comics where Peter had access to cool resources, but I didn’t vibe (as the kids no longer say) with those eras. The stories I enjoyed the most were during the eras where Peter mostly on his own.

So, even though I enjoyed Spider-Man: Homecoming (especially the scene in the car when Toomes is driving Peter and his daughter to the dance), and I found Spider-Man: Far From Home enjoyable (I really liked the take it had on Mysterio) and REALLY loved Spider-Man: No Way Home (the multiverse done right), there was always a sense that it was “a” version of Spider-Man, but not the version I really wanted to see in the movies.

Brand New Day has an interesting hill to climb. From the looks of the trailer, the powers that be seem to be trying to take the MCU version of the character and skew it more towards the “traditional” version. It has to deal with the whole “Peter had Dr. Strange make everyone forget that he was Spider-Man” thing, reset the franchise, but also be part of the larger universe that already exists.

It is also doing the MCU versions of two stories that were “controversial” in their day. The first is The Other, which was originally published from October of 2005 to January of 2006, and saw Peter getting ill, almost dying, and being reborn. The other is Brand New Day (which the movie takes its name from) which was an initiative that Marvel started in January of 2008, which followed One More Day and undid the marriage of Peter and Mary Jane, among other things.

My memory of reactions to The Other boil down to, “What is the point of this?” It wasn’t that people were all up in arms about it, but it wasn’t warmly received. Brand New Day, on the other hand, did that whole “breaking the Internet in half” thing that was so popular in the mid-to-late 2000s. If you listen very closely on a cold night when the wind is still and the moon is high you can still hear someone bitching about it on social media. To be fair, all of these reactions are based online, so take that for what it is worth.

The reason I think it’s all going to work out is that, historically, I’ve enjoyed the MCU version of stories I didn’t care for in the comics. I love Captain America: Civil War. I thought that No Way Home did a good take on One More Day. The movies have the advantage of not being tied to comic book continuity, but they have gone down much easier. So, I’m assuming that it will be the same with The Other and Brand New Day.

I liked seeing the Punisher. I liked seeing Bruce Banner. The trailer was fine. It feels like Spider-Man, but…off.

I’m not sure if I’ll be seeing this in the theater, as my wife and I don’t go to the movies like we used to, but I will definitely be seeing this at some point.

More to follow…