Special Report: Spider-Man - Brand New Day (2026)

Hey, this is Emily sowderback of Scarecrow Videos Viva Physical Media. All right, this is Matt Lynch, co host of Viva The Projection Booth. Podcast is sponsored by Scarecrow. Try out Scarecrow Videos rant by mail service. Choose from over one hundred and fifty five thousand films and get Blu rays, four k's and DVDs all delivered directly to your door.

Visit Scarecrow video dot Org. Today Old You is boot. It Show Die. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater.

They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection Booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring. Hi, my name is Peter Parker. I have something to tell you that's gonna sound crazy, but it's the truth. She's a splainer.

Man, can't tell anybody about this vacular secret. Okay, thank you, everybody. Good. Ask a lot of that. We used to know each other.

We were together. But something bad was gonna happen. Me and the only way to stop it was to do the hard thing. You're gonna forget who I am? What are you talking about?

I'm gonna come and find you, and I'll explain everything. You're better tell you. I'm just waiting to tell me. May you see me again? My name is Peter Parker and I like a coffee.

Is there anything else? Maybe I'll never read this to you help. Maybe I'm just writing this for me, and maybe that's my responsibility to live alone with the truth, because I'm not just Peter Parker, I'm Spider Man. We'll face with a threat that can be anyone. You sure you want to do this?

Scorpion? You think I'm Scorpion? Talk the better. No manner for me. I hear any as what I promised you that I would keep you saying.

Please, you just have to trust we come on, Hie. You're the only one who can sense it. Hey, can we do this one at a time? Please? You're the only one who can defeat it.

The Spidey Tracker app says that Spider Man is in the direct vicinity. Kaya No way, that's crazy. Welcome to the Projection Booth time your host Mike White joined me for a special crossover episode with the Culture Cast. Is mister Chris Statue. The letter of the day is M for Mutagon.

We are digging into Spider Man, Brand New Day, the new Tom Holland mcu film that just came out and borrows its title and a chunk of its DNA from the classic Peter Parker Mary Jane Reset comic era, along with the elements of the other storyline Chris. Before we get into what this movie is and into some spoiler territory, I want to know, is this movie worth the bucks? Is it worth going to see in theaters? I would think so. I think it is a worthy entry into a Spider Man franchise that is on its fourth film now as opposed to its third, and this feels like a fourth film in that it resets some things.

I don't know how you feel about the Last Spider Man movie because we didn't talk about it together. I don't think, but the I was not the biggest fan of the Last Spider Man movie for the same reason I wasn't the biggest fan of Deadpool Wolverine. It was just a bunch of cameos. It was a bunch of fan service, which is fine for the first time you watch it, but has anyone gone back and rewatched those movies more than maybe once? Deadpool Wolverine doesn't hold up, and the best part of that Spider Man movie is Willem Dafoe, genuinely, which is not surprising given that he was the best part of the original Spider Man movies he was in.

So the fact that this movie doesn't rely on any of that, doesn't rely on any multiverse nonsense, it doesn't have any of that. This is a and I've seen this kind of review mentioned, or this kind of point mentioned several times in other reviews. It's a more grounded Spider Man, and I think it is. This is the Spider Man that I grew up with in the comics. In a lot of ways, he's just out of high school.

He's a young adult ish still doing ground level Spider Man work. And then there's more intrigue beyond that. So I enjoyed it a fair amount. I would say it was worth it. I don't know if Marvel's going to be two for two this year with films, because obviously we have Doomsday coming out at the end of the year, which you and I will cover.

But I think so far this year they're one for two or one for one, I guess, because again I can't speak to the other one yet, but one for one, this movie's great. I've seen some reviewers say it's as good as Spider Man two. I don't hold Spider Man two in as high regard as everybody else. I think, for me, this might be the best Tom Holland Spider Man movie. I definitely think it's better than the last one.

The Jake Gillenhall one is pretty good. The first one, I think is predicated on some things like not knowing that Michael Keaton is her dad throughout most of the movie is part and parcel to what really makes that movie work. So for me, I think this is the first Tom Holland Spider Man movie that I'm like, Okay, we have escaped the old Spider Man storytelling. We've escaped this spider Man of two thousands, twenty tens, and this Spider Man is firmly now his own thing. And there are moments in this movie that we have not seen with Spider Man before.

There are things in this movie that again are so unique and novel and fun and interesting that for me, I would say, not only is it a worthy film to watch in theaters, but I think that this is the now the best Spider Man movie that we have gotten in the cinematic Spider Man era, which would have started with Raymie spider Man. So what about you, Mike. I'm curious you said that this film does some things that no other Spider Man movie has done, and I'm curious what you were thinking of for that. All of the mutant stuff, like actual mutant stuff anything with Again, I don't want to spoil that stuff, because I think that's the main spoiler of the movie. But we've seen Spider Man as a organic spider in the movies, but we've never seen it where he doesn't start out that way as Spider Man, but he's still Spider Man, and then he becomes that.

We've never seen that in the movies. And so I guess I was more speaking to having not seen it in the movies, not so much the comics, because most of this is just a millunge of things from the comics worked into a script that works better than I would have expected. Because, again, to go back to forcing a bunch of villains into a movie, Spider Man three, both the Toby Maguire one and the Tom Holland one both had a lot of villains like replete an abundance, a plethora even of villains, and this one has a lot of villains as well, but I think it definitely manages them in a way that makes sense, and the through line I think with Jean Gray also makes sense. I feel that he has more friends than enemies in this one.

Right, which is weird. We have a Batman Spider Man situation almost where he's interacting with the cops, which we have not really seen. We saw that sort of with Dennis Leary's character. But the less I think about those Andrew Garfield Spider Man movies, the better. Personally.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of what his relationship with the cops was in the previous films. It feels like it was more dealing with Ice school than anything else, and the school trip and all that, and the second film, and then with the last one, I really don't remember any cops. It was so much about the whole, let's reset the universe type of thing. And I feel like the Spider Man films have not necessarily suffered because of the rest of the MCU. We've got our introduction to Tom Holland via one of the Avengers films.

Is that Civil War that we got him introduced. That was Captain America Civil War, which is technically not an Avengers movie, but it's half of an Avengers movie. It so feels like An Order is. An Avengers movie. It's as much an Avengers movie as Ultron is.

I guess it's just the steaks. They're not world ending steaks in Civil War in Asia. Ultron their world ending steaks. So I guess that's the line of demarcation. I would agree the Spider Man movies have suffered because he's had to be part of the grander MCU framework.

The picture work that is the MCU relies a lot on Spider Man, which, again, Spider Man was a singular entity up until this point. He was in his own movies, doing his own thing. There was no crossovers, there was no The most we ever saw was Venom. That was it. Yeah, But in the comics he was very interactive with other people.

That was the thing I always enjoyed was that he had his little area of New York, mostly queens, that he would deal with. You had Daredevil over in Hell's Kitchens, like everybody had their own turf, right, So you had all of these people that had their own area, and he would team up with them. Occasionally. I remember, especially when he got the Symbiote suit that he broke into the Baxter building, which was great that he could just bypass their securities pretty easily in order to have read Richards help him with this whole problem that he was having with the waking up, and he'd still be tired. He didn't know that the Symbiote was controlling him, taking him out for a ride at night, those kind of things.

So I always enjoyed when he would do team ups, especially with the Human Torch. He doesn't team up with anybody really other than the Punisher, which I haven't watched any of these Punisher TV shows, the miniseries whatever they're doing, that weirdo movie thing that they did last time with that shot one shot with that really bad special effect that was making the rounds out on Reddit, I. Set Marvel's glad. That's all we know about that Punisher thing, if you haven't watched it is John Burnhal falling backwards off of a roof and it looking like a video game. But I thought that the relationship between him and Frank was fantastic, and especially I love the parallel now that Spider Man is forcing himself to be alone.

He doesn't want to be alone, but he has to be alone. And there's that whole thing. I think it was at the end of the first Spider Man movie, the Raimy One. I can't remember if it was the first or second, where he's basically, I'm putting all my loved ones in jeopardy. I have to stop this here.

In that third movie, he really was like, no, I have to make sure that nobody knows who the hell that I am, and thus wiped everything. But yet he's so desperate for any sort of friendship that he's now friends with the Punisher. I love that moment at the beginning where there's the girl who recognized him, Oh, we live on the same floor as I not anymore, and he moves up to the basically like the attic and creates his own lab up there. There's no mention of iron Man in this film, which I kind of like because there were moments, especially in the first Spider Man film, where it was in danger of becoming an Iron Man film because Robert Downey Junior's personality is so big and the Ironman character was so big.

It's like Spider Man doesn't need him, but he did need that tech. I like that he's got the tech in this one, that he's proven himself that he can do all of these things on his own. He's got ev instead of needing Friday or anything like that. I really like that he's in this position now of you're talking about how this is the Spider Man that you're familiar with. This is also the Spider Man I'm familiar with.

The Only thing that's missing from this is taking photos for the Daily Planet, and I appreciate that's not in this. It was actually better that he doesn't need to worry about that job at this moment. I don't know how he's making his money's pizza time, but it seems to be doing okay right now. And this was the thing with the end of that second movie where they're like, my god, look it's JK. Simmons again, which, by the way, never has come back since I'm not talking about I'm talking about it in this film.

I think now it would be a little unbelievable to have Spider Man, or again Peter Parker going and taking pictures of Spider Man. People be like you're Spider Man, like, knock it off. It's It would be hard, I guess in this version of the MCU because everyone in the MCU and genuinely a lot of moments in this movie. There's a lot of moments in this movie that have to do with Spider Man's secret identity being found out or Spider Man's secret identity being in danger. And I like that, Like you said, we don't have something that's forcing us to suspend disbelief every time we deal with it, which is he's my friend.

Like, okay, why is in every villain in the city just going after Peter Parker. Then, like again, that's to go back to the you know, why the stories of Spider Man have been the way that they are. They've had to ret con everybody knowing that Peter Parker was Spider Man multiple times. And I mean here the movie is doing that as well, because they kind of backed themselves into a corner with that second movie, and then in the third movie they did this, you know, complete forget with Doctor Strange. I think they actually nailed it in the landing here because this is kind of the landing as it were, from that third movie, from the fallout of the third movie.

I think it works. I like that, like you said, we have Spider Man as is as he has ever been his own agent, with nobody else other than maybe the Punisher and the Woman from the Bear, which I loved by the way. I was just like, oh, so, now we have Spider Man kind of interfacing with the cops in kind of an interesting novel way. It's not like a Jim Gordon Batman. It's more like some of the things I've seen in other Spider Man entertainment, like Spider Man video games or stuff where he's working.

No pun intended symbiotically with the cops to help them out where they can't really deal with a giant tank parading through New York City, but Spider Man might be able to. Which is a great way again to introduce the Punisher into this. And I really was very happy when it came to I don't really want to call her Black Widow, even though they're calling her black Widow in this Yelena now of the Thunderbolt slash New Avengers, and I was so afraid it was going to turn into Thunderbolts too for a minute, but I like that she just is there to help with a little bit of information. This movie feels very much like a detective story, which I think I really appreciate this whole idea of what is going on. We introduce that mystery of this tank being driven by this old lady very early on in this.

We've got the opening montage. We first see the tank at eight point thirty something like that. I don't know, but it depends on if you include the Marvel logo at the beginning. By the way, I came late to this movie, I for whatever reason, thought that this started at one thirty. But it started at one.

But thank goodness, my theater, which didn't used to have a long pre show, now has a very long pre show. Yes, about to say, it's double the link. So I missed the first five minutes, but thank goodness, there's already a rock. Yes, so twenty five minutes a pre show. So I didn't see any trailers, none of the commercials, nothing, So I'm.

Happy about that. So I walked in when the tank was already rolling down the street. So what you're saying is you missed the nonsensical preview for doomsday that has no bearing on anything and has not gotten me excited for it. Okay, cool, good, because I think that's the best way to go into this movie is not being reminded that there are other Marvel things that are possibly not going to be good. Because for all of the success of the MCU, can we take a step back here and just have a conversation about what these movies would have looked like Without that, they would have looked like this movie where it's just we get to see the characters because Marvel owns them, but not everything has to be dialed into the grand mythology that is the MCU.

Part of me now, with the success that Marvel has not been having, wishes that they maybe hadn't gotten so far so quickly with the MCU and flamed out as much as they had, because this Spider Man movie is really a return to form of a kind of superhero movie that we haven't had in a while. You think about the last MCU movies we've had, they've all been like directly dialed into the main mythos of this kind of multiverse story arc. This movie has none of that, Like you said, with Black Widow and Punisher, like they're there, but they're not there to the point where it distracts from Spider Man. This is a Spider Man movie and I know the last one had for Spider Man Editor three, but this one is so much more a Spider Man movie because I feel like, for the first time it after is the tone of just he's just a kid.

He has these powers, and he doesn't even necessarily understand the powers, especially in this movie, because we're getting the Man Spider story, but we get to actually see Spider Man just dealing with what it's like to be a superhero in a world where the superheroes don't just have a needing place to go hang out at. We don't even see Avenger's Tower in this which I was pretty grateful for. It's so contained. If you hadn't seen some of the other MCU movies, you would not know, other than certain lines that they drop in this movie that there was a bigger world out there. Hulk and Black Widow and Punisher we understand that they've existed within this framework.

This is not the first time they're being introduced, and I think even if you're just coming to this movie as someone who's never seen an MCU movie, I think you'd be able to understand what had happened to this point in some of their relations. But at the same time, because Spider Man is an unknown quantity as Peter Parker, but only known as Spider Man, and they have an interesting kind of conceit that they can play with here to get away with that they wouldn't otherwise. If we didn't have that, we'd have to be oh, hey, doctor Banner once again from the eight million times. It's like, I don't need any of that. Genuinely, I'm so glad that this is such a singular Spider Man movie in the way that they've presented it.

It feels like this movie is comfortable in its own skin. It doesn't feel beholden to so many things, even with cam Urbertfifs the last movie or the movie before. I think it was the second one where they were talking about the blip a lot. Yeah, I didn't go back and rewatch all of these. Instead, for whatever reason, I ended up rewatching The Fantastic four First Steps yesterday, and I think it was just the idea of setting us up for them coming into the rest of the MCU.

That also ties into Thunderbolts with them watching the footage at the end. So I was trying to refresh my wife a little bit about that stuff and just okay, this is where we're at with things. And once I started to get into the j Jonah Jamison stuff, she was just like, okay enough. I was like, and I was glad because he didn't show up in here, and I was they do. I don't even know how they would explain that anymore.

I guess they could. Honestly, now would have been the way to do it, because j Jonah Jamison wouldn't know who he is, so just be like that that pesky Spider Man whatever. Yeah, But honestly, I Doctor Pearlmutter and I on my show, we often talk about choices that you make when you're making a film, but also the choices that they don't make, and the fact that they don't lean on j Jonah Jamison, I think is impressive. We don't need it. It's again, there's just like I don't need Uncle Ben.

I don't need Uncle Ben at all. Aunt May, I think has been instrumental. Marissa Tomay has been instrumental at really helping ground Peter Parker and Spider Man in a emotionally resonant way that the other Spider Man movies kind of never met. Andrew Garfield movies really never hit it. They told me a Maguire ones a little bit Cliff Robertson was a pretty good Uncle Ben.

But we get to genuinely feel like this Spider Man is a human being, and a lot of that comes from just them not doing the things you would expect. No Uncle Ben, Marisa Toomey instead, Aunt May, no j Jonah Jamison, just the city being appreciative of Spider Man, and they're not being any kind of wiggle room. I know, in our day and age, if a person like Spider Man existed, there would be all kinds of insane conspiracy theory shit. But I like that in this movie, it's just like the city is pulling for Spider Man collectively. I like that.

I genuinely think that for me, that gives me an idea in a sense that the people that are making these movies don't feel super tied to having to do constant MCU future proofing setup bullshit. This movie is just like, you know what, who knows if in the next movie they'll just love Spider Man as much as they do now. But in this movie it works, I think tonally where they're coming from. It works absolutely, And that was one of the things I liked about the reemi Spider Man was when it was sider Man Day and they had the woman like playing the violin and doing the Spider Man theme and stuff. And I always like how they will work in the Spider Man theme, like here for ned with his app and everything, having that as the little notification tone.

I thought that was good. But yeah, it was very nice to see the whole city pulling for Spider Man rather than he's an outlaw. We've we got that a little bit with the Dark Knight, that that whole thing at the end where it's like, oh no, I'll take all the blame for everything. And he runs off into the shadows with his big ears flapping back and forth, and then he just fucks off. There is no outlaw Batman that we get to see in the third movie.

He just disappears into Wayne Manor and never comes out again. He becomes I think he even makes a joke about Howard Hughes, so yeah, and I think there's even a talk about keeping his urine and jars. But here, I like that everybody knows who he is and everybody's okay with it. Like that he is able to walk into Lena's apartment building nobody freaks out because it's Spider Man. They just know who he is and he's just part of the city.

And I do like that relationship he has with the cop. I think that's pretty nice. She's kind of a surrogate mom a little bit to him. But yeah, Aunt May is so crucial and that is his core memory. When are we going to get to the spoilers with this one.

I think we have to. Okay, when I think we both agree, go see this movie in theaters. Yeah, if you see only one MCU movie this year in theaters, it's probably I would lean into it being this one. You're not going to have a bad time with this movie. When Jean Gray first tries to enter into his mind.

The worst kept secret in the MCAU since Toby Maguire Andrew Garfield being in another Spider Man movie. I'm very glad because I had no idea. I honestly had no idea what was happening in this movie. I didn't watch any of the previews. Previews they spoiled it by accident on the red carpet last week.

Okay, when one of the people was like that my favorite part of the movie is Gene and that was the first time anyone had said anything publicly about it up until a week ago. So yeah, I loved that. I didn't know who the bad guy was walking into this. I saw the hand, the Red hand or whatever. For a brief second, I thought I saw a Scorpion, And I really thought Scorpion was going to be our main villain in this movie, with the way that he was introduced, which was just bizarre.

But I liked when he shows up and I thought it was a really good suit and it's just nice to see a classic villain like that. So when Jean tries to enter into his head the first time, that's the memory that comes up, and that's the memory that keeps going back to. And that for me is basically, with great power comes great responsibility. But we don't hear that in this movie, and I was kind of glad for it. It's like we're breaking with tradition in all the right ways for me.

They're hinting at it, they're remixing it. We have the Keith David kind of commentary that goes on during that Spider document that Peter's watching, which did you watch any of the previews for this movie? Didn't watch any of the previews. You should go back and watch some of the previews because the way that they use the Keith David narration is really good, Like it's really well done. It really makes you feel like the people that are making this movie are telling a Spider Man story.

The last great Spider Man story I think anyone told was the video games, Like those Spider Man video games that have come out in PlayStation. Are the people who make those games get it. They're able to really like, you have the whole city, you have a whole cadre of villains and heroes to mess around with. But they really get to the idea of what spider Man, this version of Spider Man is and what his story in this movie is, which is finding himself again and who he is? Is he Peter Parker?

Is he Spider Man? By the end of the movie, I love that it's I'm both and I can be both, And I like that it's that moment and you know what, it feels like. It feels like the reverse I Am iron Man moment, and it feels like this is a brand new day feels more like a I would say, for me, brand new day seems more about the mcu as a whole and less just Spider Man, because for me, that feels like this movie's big I Am spider Man moment, right, he could literally echo the I Am iron Man moment, but instead it's I am both, And that is so important Because Tony Stark, he was either iron Man or Tony Stark. He had a hard time being both. And I think we kind of saw maybe by the end of an endgame, even an endgame he says I am iron Man.

That ends up being like the whole ego centric mantra, that's who Tony Stark is. Right, He could have been Tony Stark at the end of that movie, and instead it was about being iron Man that one last time, and in him being iron Man that one last time, he sacrifices everything. I don't think Peter Parker wants to sacrifice everything to be Spider Man. He wants to be both. And I like that this movie again, it's more emotionally in tune with what I was hoping Spider Man movie could be than any Spider Man movie before.

Genuinely, this is an emotionally engaging Spider Man movie. Tell me the last time an mcu movie was emotionally engaging, genuinely. I don't even think there has been one. Maybe the Eternals, which I know will piss a shitload of people off, but it is the truth. I don't know.

For me, it's endgame. I really teared up when you hear Sam say on your left that whole end battle. There's a lot of great moments in there, so I was really into that one, and I would have to say the previous one with Infinity War when Thor shows up, I mean the whole audience, including me, was cheering ourselves out, and when Black Panther bit it, I was pretty emotional as well, not as emotional as some of the people in the audience, but it was really sad to see him go because he was becoming a favorite character. Rip Chadwick Boseman. But there were a.

Lot of moments for me in that In this world, I think when Aunt may bid it in the last one, I was pretty upset and really had hoped that wouldn't happen. But yeah, there are a lot of moments in this where I was just like, oh wow, I could really feel the heartstrings being tugged, you know, especially with all the stuff with both Ned and MJ which was really it's I like those characters so much, and I like the actress that played them so much, especially the guy that plays Ned. He does such a great job. I don't know if you've ever seen Reginald the Vampire, but he's the star of that show, really good show based on a book series called Fat Vampire. I think he plays the perfect fat vampire.

And I just love what a fan of Spider Man he is without being a creep in this and I love his theories on who Spider Man actually is. I think that's the only time we see Flash. I was afraid that Flash was her boyfriend when he showed up, but I was quickly dissuaded. I was like, oh wait, no, that's just another guy with longer black hair. An Indian, another Indian looking actor.

It was very funny because I thought the same thing when he came on screen. No, we only see Tony Revelori in the one shot with him, and I think it's Martin Starr because they were both from the last three movies. Again, there's not a lot from the first three movies. There's a lot from MCU stuff, if there's MCU stuff, but there's not a lot from the previous movies other than MJ and Ned, which I liked. I genuinely thought, like good reject the other spot.

I guess there's Scorpion, but again, Scorpion was barely a part of those other movies anyways. It's not like Scorpion was a main villain. He was about as much of a villain in those movies as he is in this, which is to say he's being piloted by somebody else or has a different engagement with Spider Man. That's not just a direct villain, because wasn't it in the first movie he was stealing the equipment from damage Control or whatever damage control was with a clar was vulture, but he was part of cultures saying oh yeah, yeah, right right, that's why looks like Culture's gear, because they're all it's all kind of chatari tech, I'm pretty sure, is what this all was originally. And that's the thing.

There are things that have fed into this movie that are deep MCU stuff. I guess when I meant emotional things like not characters dying or big stand up moments, but actually engaging with the character as what it means to be a superhero and that's not something that these MCU movies have been interested in doing. The only time we've really seen that in a big budget movie is those Chris Nolan Batman movies, And I think this movie is in a lot of ways what those movies could have been, which is, what does it mean for a person to give up their life to do this, because it's kind of hard to have a normal life if you're doing this, And Spider Man is now taking upon himself to see what it is that he could do to balance those things out, because stay your own by yourself is clearly not a viable option in the MCU.

So I'm excited to see where they go with it because they seem to be getting at the fact that Spider Man. Any future Spider Man movie will have more of this kind of stuff, more him engaging and interacting with other people. It won't It'll be a Spider Man movie with other people, not so much like Spider Man in someone else's movie a La Captain America Civil War, because that was not a Spider Man movie. He just happened to be in it, which still one of the smartest things they've done was introducing him in a movie that wasn't his own movie. Absolutely, him jumping onto the screen after the under rus thing was just.

That was still paying off to this day. The audience went fucking crazy for that man. Yeah, and I again, this is very much a detective story, him trying to find out what's going on at damage control. He even gives a Colombo line as he's leaving the office of the guy who's running damage control. He literally does one more thing and he's talking about the whole Vmax thing and asking me about that big vault.

What could be behind the door of that big vault. I like that. It's kind of a mcguffin. I don't think there's anything inside that vault because they get in there, but she doesn't get what she wants. There is nothing waiting in there.

When they kept talking about Vmax, I kept thinking, oh, Venom Max or something like that. I was just like, Oh God, I hope it's not the symbiote. I really hope we're not going that way. The other thing I was very surprised about is just the limits of the mutation that Spider Man is undergoing. I really thought we were going to see full fledged man Spider by the end of this movie.

I was hoping for it as someone who enjoyed the cartoon in the nineties. I always think of that Spider Man toy with the spider face and the six arms, Like I knew they were not going to do it. They did. I guess they did as close as they were ever gonna do, right, Like, this is more like that story. And again this was when I was reading the comics.

I've lapsed on reading comics, but when I was well fifteen or sixteen is when the other came out. And that's more what this is. It's like, he doesn't turn into a man spider, he just becomes more like a spider. The spider DNA is becoming more reactive for whatever. Again, mcguffin reason the let's add Bruce Banner to this movie of it all, which I think works again if we're leaning into now, because then again I joked about it when we open the episode like Emma's for Mutation, they say it a lot.

And if you didn't know X Men were gonna be in this movie, they gave it away. Before Gene Gray ever shows up. He's like mutant this and muting that, and it's my RNA and it's my DNA and the mutation, and it's like, can we talk about how they've done this before, because they already did this with Scarlet Witch. The X Men have been in the MCU well in a decade now, but they had. To explain it all the way.

They couldn't use. Em planing it all the way here too, is my point, they're doing the same thing that they did with Scarlet Witch, where it's like we have them and we're trying to figure out their powers, and in us figuring out their powers, they are able to better understand and then have an amplified version of their powers afterward, which is literally what happens in this movie by the end of it. I don't know if Jean Gray could do that stuff ahead of time, but by the end of the movie, she's able to literally create a bubble like fifty miles or something. It's like a huge like one hundred and ten kilometers or something around her what she hasn't been able to do upen to that point. So it makes me think what they were doing in this movie exacerbated that.

Just like with Scarlet Witch being who is she being? Was it Baron Morto not Morto? No? Who the hell was it. But that whole thing was because of the Infinity Stones, which didn't really make a lot of sense.

I kept wondering, if they destroy the Infinity Stones, or once Theanos gets his glove on the Infinity Stones, wouldn't all of their powers just go away? Wouldn't even kep him? Because you got to remember Captain Marvel Quicksilver vision, like all these guys are being powered by the Yeah, powered by the Infinity Stones, which is wild. That was the way we could explain all this stuff. Why we couldn't even use the word mutant.

We had to use whatever that stuff, the Agents of Shield, which tied into the short lived TV show that was so bad, the Immortals. The Immortals, the one with black. Bowl, yes, and the one with the CGI hair. Yeah. Yeah.

So all I mean the project Kevin Figy wishes we didn't mention in this podcast. So all that stuff was we need to get around mutations somehow, we need another way to explain how people have powers. It was a radioactive spider, It's gamma radiation. That was one way of doing it before we had the mutants. And yeah, I appreciate that we have mutations here.

I appreciate too, once she forms that bubble around herself. It really reminded me of the moment when Professor X has a freak out and Logan and everyone is paused and can't move. Only Logan can you get through it because of his healing mutation. I like that a lot, and. It feels like this movie was made with that future proofing in mind, because we already have how they're going to have some of the mutants in the mcub because they're just gonna be reformed versions of the X Men from the Fox Ones, because that's how battle World is, right, It's just like everything gets mashed together and then we have new versions.

So there's gonna be a new Tony Stark is what like all sorts of new stuff, and the new X Men are going to be predicated on the old x Men. So anything in this movie is already more or less we've seen it. Like you said, in the other X Men movie, they literally have cannon to draw from. And I'm so glad that we are finally at this point. I'm sure everybody Marvel is disappointed.

It took fucking fourteen years or whatever it is to this point. Eighteen years, I guess it's eighteen. Yeah, well two thousand and eight was Iron Man, and we had stuff before him. Obviously, we had the Spider Men films and any all the way movies. I can go all the way back to the ground zero of like The Incredible Hulk, those kind of things.

We don't know with Doomsday how far their net goes back, But I hope whenever we do see more of the Mutants, it's in this same vein that they've done with Geene Gray in this movie, which is giving us something we've seen before in some respects, but in a lot of other ways, mining things that have not been mined before in the comic books, because we've already seen certain things in the comics represented in the movies. A lot of the things that work for me in this movie are things we've never seen in the movies before that has never been represented in Spider Man before. Now. A close friend of mine who I podcast with from time to time, Dustin, he's huge Spider Man fanly like you are, and you guys are about the same age, and he was one of his complaints about this movie was like, it's a lot of things mashed in that are not necessarily related in the comic books, and I know you would agree, because that is the case.

These are not necessarily all going on at the same time in the comics. I think they make it work. I could see, though, how one might take a little bit of umbrage with it, because they are and they've done this with a lot of other things, like this is maybe the one mcuie thing that this movie does. They're clipping certain parts of the story off to make this story smaller to fit together, good and bad. But if you like some if certain stories resonate with you more than others, I can see why you might be a little bit miffed that they're cutting parts of the story out to make way for another thing that isn't necessarily representative of the story in the comic books.

We've had this conversation before. I think that the movies are allowed to do whatever the hell they want, like remix and remaster and do whatever. You're not beholden to anything. Really, I think there are some things you're beholden to, and I think that's why those Snyder movies fail so horribly, as like they don't understand the base idea of the characters. These characters, regardless of the setting always feel like the characters off the page, which is the thing that the MCU has always succeeded at, which is making a character who is at least representative of the character from the comic books.

Maybe it's not a wonder one, but it's a close amalgamation. The comics are the comics and the movies are the movies, and I'm really okay with them being completely different entities. If I got then to have a shape when it came to differences between the comics and the movies, I would never be able to sleep at night. And I just my titles. More variable people that are like that though, that's true, but I not gonna say unfortunately, Like if you love something that much, I get it, like I would be hard pressed to tell you don't.

But at the same time, like you can like both separately, like they can be loved on equal footing without their being the overlap is the character And that's all you need to like really say, And that's it. Just the comics themselves have been rebooted and reset and reinterpreted so many times in the comic books that if a movie wants to do it, as long as they're doing it well, I'm okay with that. I don't care about some of the changes because you have to make some of these changes. If I was so bent out of shape about stuff Venom like I already mentioned the symbio coming in from the Secret Wars, like that was changed so quickly. I think the first time was in the cartoon.

And again the cartoon has its own history and all that stuff. So yeah, okay, rather than it being something from this like said Battle World with the Beyonder, No, it's j Jo. No. Jamison's son is an astronaut and he brings back this thing with him. Okay, same diff and like I've seen that in some of the movies, just it comes in different ways.

I really don't care. It's yeah, okay, this is a different Geen Gray, and we're seeing her sister alive and all these kind of things, which is a comic book thing. Yeah, I'm really okay with the way that they're doing this. I was just so grateful that we see her at the end on a bus and we don't see her pulling up to Xavier's School for Gifted children. I was so angry.

It's a ranger in the north find him. That's always what I think of is that fucking scene from the end of the Hobbit. That's always what I think of, because it's just unnecessary. We know where she's going approximately possibly who knows. Frankly, we didn't need Wolverine on a motorcycle pulling up next to her or something.

It's really okay. Yeah, I will say, as someone who did know the Sadie sinc of it all pretty poorly kept secret, given that she's a redhead in the comics. If she's not Mary Jane, there are a several handful of famous Marvel redheads. And if you don't just disclose, I don't know, I feel like the fuck it was? Don't do this back and forth bullshit.

I'm sick of this. We just you know, what, what does it have to do with the quality of the movie? Nothing? And what you benefit from one day's worth of people not knowing? I don't get it.

Let's just stop, just stop with this secret casting nonsense. You get a lot more benefit out of surprising people at a con than you do when they're sitting down in the seats at the movie. Oh my god, a movie that's gonna have Jeen Gray and Spider Man in it. That sounds crazy. You could have gotten a lot out of that too.

There's nothing to be said that people wouldn't be as excited, if not more excited, to go see this movie knowing that Jean Gray, an X Men character that we haven't seen in what ten plus years, is gonna be in another Marvel movie, which means we're gonna get more X Men. Now we have to hide it. Stop doing the con NOONI and singing stuff. Just stop. It's just it.

We're in the Internet era. It doesn't work in professional wrestling. It doesn't work here. I'm so glad that I knew nothing about this, right right, it's. Just fucking annoying at this point.

Unless you're intentionally avoiding it, which is what you do, it's almost damn near imp possible to not have it ruined. And so it's just assume that it's going to be ruined. Don't assume that everybody's gonna be able to shut themselves out to the world. There's an episode of the King of Queens where they're all trying to watch the Super Bowl and not have it spoiled for them ahead of time or something like that. It's like that.

It's if you don't watch the movie after the first weekend. You can't complain if it's spoiled for you if there's something like this in it. So just don't have it be a spoiler. Just have it be part of the movie, because again I think unlike and I think that this goes into my criticism of a dead Pool Wolverine style movie where the whole movie is predicated on the fucking twist and there's no substance between any of it. This movie actually does a lot with the fact that Jean Gray is in the movie and Sadie Sink is really good in this movie.

She's a great actress. Again, as someone who's watched a lot of Stranger Things, I can tell you that was like the thing most people know her from. And towards the latter half of the show, she's not really given much to do. But as someone who's seen her grow up as an actress from a preteen to now in her twenties, she's a great actress. She's a great dramatic actress.

She gives the character of Jean Gray a lot of intensity that a character like that needs. Because if we're going in the direction that I think we are going with that character, which is a Dark Phoenix story or a Phoenix story, you need to have a character that can have a level of aggression that the MCU has not seen before. It's like Scarlet Witch on steroids. I hope to god they don't do another Dark Phoenix story because we've seen it so many times. I mean the whole thing of the alien tech and all that stuff.

I mean again, we've seen the Dark Phoenix story told so many times. I don't go to comic book conventions very much at all. I think I've been to a couple in Toronto because I was invited to host some Q and a's that's what we met Mike, Yeah, exactly. And I went to a MotorCity comic con down here maybe WI maybe just the one time. And I remember hanging out with my friend Mitch and we're going through comics and I'm just like, oh, look it's a Dark Phoenix story.

Oh look it's another Dark Phoenix story. And I had some nerdling kind of go off on me, like they've only done that storyline twice, and I was like, no, I think you're very wrong. And I went out to a website that had a lot of different comic book covers, and I just found over and over again all of the Dark Phoenix storylines. There were probably twenty at least, and I'm like, kid, they've done this to death. And so even seeing it in the movies, that was such a major part of one of those first X Men.

I think it was even part of one of that whole James McAvoy world of Men as well. Yeah, I think you might not go back talk about things. I'm not gonna rewatch in preparation for doomsday. Those movies, you know what, I might just to remind myself how bad they are, because I will say, as someone who is a Michael Fossbender fan, he is really good as he is good in movies, which is to be fair, he's can I just call him white? Idris Elba?

He seems to be in bad movies, but he's always good in them, which is Idris Elba's thing as well. He's in bad movies all the time. He's not the bad part. But I saw a dark Tower in theaters. I have a right to.

Complain Assassin's creed, my friend. Oh yeah, there you go. It's interesting though, because again the X Men we've heard about for years now that they're going to come into the MCU. And what's funny is, in a lot of ways, they're just like Spider Man used to be. We heard over and over again that Spider Man was going to be in the MCU, because Spider Man didn't get introduced into the MCU until twenty sixteen, which is eight years into the MCU.

So the X Men are like the next it was the Fantastic Four. A Again, the Fantastic Four, I feel like are less of a big deal than the X Men, only because those Fantastic Four movies didn't have the legs that X Men did. I think those X Men movies were successful enough. They kept making the X Men movies because those movies were successful, not because just because they had the license like they did with Fantastic Four. X Men, I think are so evergreen that they knew they were going to be able to get a lot of mileage out of a Spider Man movie.

So it was smart to put an X Men character in here. And I think it's also smart to put an X Men character that's not one of the ones that you would expect. It's not a Cyclops or a Wolverine like you said, or a Professor X, like Jean Gray, a character that, like you already said, Dark Phoenix is a story that they have done before. My contention is they haven't done it well. I don't need to see them do it again.

But it does seem like we're trending in a aggression as being output by Jean Gray. We kind of see the way it affects Spider Man because Spider Man starts going Symbio, which I think is obviously there's a setup there in that as well. There's a setup for both of these characters, as it were, to become these darker versions of themselves. I don't need a Dark Phoenix thing, but I do think it's smart that we have a character that doesn't have a massive, built in iconic fan base the way a Cyclops or a Wolverine or a Magneto or Professor X. And I think beyond those four any character would have been fair game.

That's why Deadpool used Colossus. That's the way I look at it. You can get mileage out of lesser X Men characters by it have them interacting with characters that are tonally very different from themselves. And what have we had so far? We've had Professor X show up in the Doctor Strange movie.

I always forget about them. We have beasts show up in the Marvels. Yeah, that's the one that they've never readdressed, And I guess technically they never readdressed the Professor X one either. And that was nice too because we had Blackpoll show up, which I think is probably gonna be one of the few times we ever see those guys. Who knows the Battle world.

I don't know, I would assume so, But the same time, maybe they recast that character and have somebody else play them. And it's actually a critical part of the next part of the MCU. Who knows I would personally like to see the next part of the MCU have nothing to do with a lot of the characters we've already seen. Have some characters that allow us to be grounded in that world, but don't give us like, oh, new tone, he's dark, I don't who cares good. But give us a new Black Bolt or a new somebody else.

I know they're gonna give us iron Man because it's I'm sure, But there's a lot of interesting room and places to go and having a gen Gray in this movie. If you had told me they're gonna have an X Men character in a Spider Man movie, obviously, I know where my brain goes immediately. It's Wolverine, because Wolverine was a big part of Ultimate Spider Man in the comic books. But if you're gonna have a character that can interact with a Spider Man who is searching for himself and at odds with himself, that's Gene Gray already as a character. So to have them on this parallel course in this movie where they intersect at the end with him and her in his mind and her interacting with Marissa Tome, that seems really good.

That's what I mean by the emotional core of this movie is unlike any other MCU movie i've seen that, Like, it's not just a character dying, it's a character having an internal conversation with themselves about their place in the world and what that means for them as a person and as a superhero. And none of these movies have really had enough time or slowed down enough to do that genuinely. And that's a shame, because if you do it, you can actually do it pretty well. There is a lot of emotionality behind these characters in the comic books. People are invested in these characters not just because they beat the shit out of villains.

It's because Spider Man is a teenager, and we were all a freak teenager at one point. Jean Gray is at odds with herself because we all have an internal struggle sometimes with the person we want to be in the person we are. Like. Those are things that they understand in the comics that the MCU has always had a joke for. There's not to cut away to a fucking joke in this movie, man, it's wild.

I was so surprised that Hal Sparks was not the person in the elevator when he's wearing the girl's T shirt and pants. Wish I kind of was hoping that he would say, nice outfit. I wish that's the crossover we needed. Right, Where's hell Sparks when you need this guy? I'm amazed I can remember how Sparks's name.

But I was a big Queerest Folk fan. I thought you were gonna say, you're a big fan of I love the seventies, I love the eighties. Oh my god, he. Money out of that. Do you know who I feel the worst for in this entire movie?

Is poor Bruce Banner man, Oh my god, the way they're carting him off to the hospital and they're just like, yeah, he's gonna be in Bellevue now, And I'm like. Don't worry, folks, He'll get the help he needs. Like that episode of The Simpsons where they're carting Homer off and he's having the shit being out of him. He's gonna go somewhere that will help him. Yeah, fucking be like.

Oh boy, I felt so bad. And that's one of the things that I think they bring up slightly and they don't necessarily mine it, maybe as much as they can, but I'm ambivalent about it. This whole idea of the power suppression, the stuff that this is. It all right, this is the mutant of it all, because now Bruce Banner is a mutant too. Technically I guess he always was.

But yeah, ish, but this whole thing of being able to repress somebody's power. So we saw that in Deadpool two with those collars and the way that Deadpool was back to being riddled with cancer because his powers were turned off. We get a little bit of that there, but here I'm glad the ball of Oar Trask is in this one. I have to say one of the scenes that really worked the best for me was when Spider Man is having his problems and he's trying to use that power inhibitor on himself and he falls and there's this big explosion of webs. The one guy comes up to him and starts talking to him, and I'm just like, who the hell is this And then I realized, oh, he's possessed that scene.

That guy who plays that possessed person though, he did a wonderful job. And then I really like how Jeane is bouncing from person to person not necessarily where they fly forward and they have her spirit entering them. I'm talking about when the people on the street start all using her voice. I thought that was really good. Yeah, it's very Elias Cotias of her very yes, is it that movie at the Fallen but Fallen?

Yeah? Is on my side. Yeah, I was waiting for her to start saying it. Man, That's what it felt like, because it's like the people like do that like reaction thing and they're like, hello, Spider Man. It works really well and I think it's a fun power that we have not seen in the MCU.

And how do you counter that power. Oh you don't, I guess if you're Spider Man. It's like a solidarity of the mind that the strong minded are able to keep Jean Gray at bay. But if you are weak mind and of weak will, like and look you see the hand right, they are supposed to be these like Japanese assassins that are of steely mind and steel willed, and like here they are being taken over by Jean Gray. Her powers are again she took over the Hulk, so you know, it's one person at the beginning, and then it becomes like whole groups of people by the end of the movie.

So her power is just being amplified more and more. She is a terrifying character. Well and literally at this point in the movie when she's using that guy and when Spider Man starts to look at his own apartment and see her and see this guy using her voice, I still don't know who it is. So I wish that you had that experience that I had where I did not know that Jean Gray was in this movie, so I just kept wondering, who is this person who is controlling all of this stuff. It worked wonderfully, even when he sees her in the car and takes that picture of her.

I still don't know who that is. I'm just like, who is this girl? Who could this be? I honestly did not know for quite a while afterwards who that was. So I thought that It's one of those where I always go back to, because I'm old.

I always go back to, what if people didn't know that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a good guy and terminator too? And Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up in this movie with that box of roses and that shotgun inside of it, and you think he's there to kill Sarah Connor. Maybe this cop is here to protect Sarah Connor because we don't know anything. And when he pulls out that shotgun and turns to Eddie Furlong and says, come with me if you want to live, that would have been a bring the house down reveal. But every fucking body that saw that movie knew what was going to happen.

Were you seemingly the only person who win the reveal in this movie happened? Did you react? Did anyone else in the theater react? Andrea reacted because she also didn't know, because she doesn't give a shit, So. Hell yeah, what's that like, I wish that could be that person.

Yeah, it doesn't fucking matter. You're fucking right, more or less broadly, it doesn't matter, but I care. God, tamnit, I don't even know, to be honest, if she knows who Jean Gray is. If I said, oh, that's that was the one that Famka Janssen played, and whoever that chick from the Game of Thrones, that what played the second. Jean Gray, Sansus Stark, Jesus Christ Sophie.

Turner, had I said that, Oh. Boy, I can't wait to rewatch those movies. Mike had I said that she might have been like, oh, okay, that's the same character. That's the one who died in the First Avengers or Second Avengers, whatever that one was. I think it was the first.

Wasn't that who Jean Gray died in the first one? So she died in the second? Does she die in the second one? Okay, she's the one that's the flood that's coming from the damn Yeah, that's the second one, because the third one is where she to use your parlance, where she gangs Professor X. Remember how exciting that movie was.

We're on the Precipice here, right, and you mentioned already like the hulk of it all, and I hope to god the whole gets like a better movie after battle World happens, because they've essentially said, like there's no more Marvel movies until like battle World, Like we get like this and like Doomsday, and then there's like scant Marvel movies and battle World happens. Then I think other things are happening, like the four or fives or whatever, if there are any. Why do you keep saying battle World? By the way, that's the sequel to do this thing, sequel to Avengers Doomsday. It's not gonna be called battle World, but it's not even called Secret Wars.

But battle World is the thing that is going to happen at the end of Doomsday, where like all the planets are mashed together into one big planet. They've ruined so much of this ahead of time because they're doing these stories because they have to reboot even though they don't have to reboot everything. This is how you don't reboot everything. Imagine if Doomsday wasn't happening and this was just the next thing is they're introducing X Men, and that's it. I would have been so much more excited because I just I have such a real aversion to the Avenger movies after Endgame, because Endgame was like maybe the last good thing that they've really done in an Avengers context.

Everything else, all these sideways Avengers movies are halfway. Avengers movies have not been Gray. No, I can agree. There's been so many, And it was kind of surprising to see that some of the screenwriters on this also worked on Quantumania, but I think more importantly they worked on all of these other Spider Man films, which it's amazing when you have I almost said Mary Jane, When you have MJ on the roof and she's recounting like, oh yeah, night Monkey and the thing at the Washington Monument and all this kind of stuff, was is interesting that later on you think about and you're like, oh, that's Gene Gray, my all of those memories, because I didn't realize that that was Geane Gray for the longest time, So like later on, I was like, oh shit, she was.

She got there before Spider Man even got to MJ's apartment, right that whole thing. I thought she was trapped in the helicopter with the helicopter pilot, and I was like, oh, okay, yeah, she can't jump anywhere, and not realizing that she can do that whenever she wants and to whoever it is, as long as they're within thirty three feet and then she could just make all those jumps. I really like that they make these references. I really like that Ned and MJ are such a massive part of this movie. The moment for me that touched me the most is when they It was two scenes one of Ned and Spider hanging out and just being friends again, and just the way that Spider Man is so happy to have friends one more time.

Such a smart way to use it. He made the Spider Man app so if Spider Man shows up, he will just lose his mind and there's your end, spider Man. Yeah. But then the handshake at the end, I fucking love that. Oh I got chills during that.

It's such an earned moment, and that Peter Jesus, no, I'm with you. That's what I mean. The best parts of this movie are the emotional moments between the characters. It's not the big action scenes. The action scenes are great, but it's an MCU movie.

In twenty twenty, six. I don't expect the action scenes to be bad. They have always been pretty up to par. The thing that's nice about this movie is there's an eye for the comic books. We get those panel shots essentially where Spider Man is like recreating panels from the comic or covers from the comic.

Oh yeah, the famous first cover with that criminal that he's holding. That's so good. They do all of these things that make me understand that the people that are writing these Spider Man movies are fans of Spider Man, not just in a surface level way, they actually understand the character, because this feels like a Spider Man comic book in movie form. And that's because Spider Man is an emotionally driven character. It is about his relationships with MJ and Aunt May and obviously, I mean, we've never seen it in these movies, but you know, Harry Osborne that we get ned as his best friend in this movie, or you know again, we saw him with Tony Stark in the other movies as kind of the the stand in for Uncle Ben in a lot of ways, but this is the first one where I genuinely feel like Spider Man is an emotionally grounded and real character, and it took three movies to get to this point, and they've kind of snowballed to this point because he's Tom Holland is so good.

Yes, I think he's the best Spider Man like at this point, like and I think that this movie cements it. He went four for four. None of the movies struggle because of him at all. Like he's end z and Daya also fantastic. Not an actress I've seen in a lot of things up to this point.

I've seen her in several things, but I saw her in the drama earlier this year. She was also great in that. But Tom Holland and her and Jacob Battelon, the guy who plays Net, are so good together. Yes, just the chemistry that they have. They feel like friends because I think they are friends in real life.

And obviously Tom Holland in is and I are married, so you know also that. But Tom Holland is able to really be charismatic with anybody he's on screen with, and that Spider Man. Spider Man is pg Deadpool in a lot of ways. He's not as met as Deadpool, but he is cracking jokes and he is stretching at one point, he's like, I'm not a teenager anymore. Great, this is what I want from Spider Man.

They're nailing it. Toby Maguire got that, Andrew Garfield got that too, but this just this feels so much more earned because I really empathize with the character underneath the mask more than I ever have before. I completely agree. Yeah, when he I can't even remember what the one liner is when he pulls the piano at Scorpion, it's. Just hit us out on a high note.

Yes, that's There are so many good things and yeah, the whole stretching thing. I was like, this is really good. I like this, this is great. And that's what I loved about Spider Man was what a smart ass he was when he put on the suit. When he's Peter Parker, he's steering, endearing, he's kind of quiet, kind of shy, but then when he puts on that mask, he just it's balls out.

And he's been that way for forever. And that's the thing when you get good writing, and you get him being able to make those quips, even just the stuff of him arguing with Frank Castle and that whole thing of you know, I saved. You anything, I'm not good at him at all. For the most part, I really liked him in this, and like I said, it almost makes me want to go back and watch The Punisher. Not quite, but.

You got made two thirds of the way there. Maybe I don't even think you're half This movie I think is the best he's been The Punisher. I liked him in the movies, both of them, and I'm trying to remember. I think he was in that one with Oh gosh, who's the guy that played Frederick Mercury, Rammy Malik, Rammy Malik The Amateur He I think he was in that as well, and he was really good in The Amateur. So yeah, I like him as a supporting character.

I don't know if I like him as the main lead of stuff, but maybe when these days I'll give it a shot. Well, and we have the issue with a Punisher style character where he is an R rated character, so they can also, I think make that work. We've seen now that you can have Deadpool in these movies, you could. I think Punisher shows that's a thing that you could get away with if you have the right people writing it and the right people directing it. Again, those are big ifs, but I think they can be done because that was again a thing that we know.

There's a possibility that Deadpool is part of the MCU. Know I think he obviously will be. But The Punisher, I think is a good test case to see you can have a character that uses guns and kills people in the things that he is doing, being a rejected by the superhero broadly because Spider Man's like, you can't just go around killing people. It's like, I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want. Okay, they can be at odds with each other, put work together, and I like that this movie shows that because I think the MCU has been too narrow in a lot of what it's been doing, and I think that this movie shows you can actually tell a smaller story that has bigger implications on the grand or MCU without the entire city of New York or the world being under threat.

Yes, the entire world is technically under threat, but not really. I don't know, yes and no, and yes. I think that's what's interesting. This movie threads that needle very well because it does feel like a grand threat, but it feels like much smaller scale. Even in the climax of the movie with Jean Gray.

It's not a giant blue light pointing to the sky, you know what I mean, But it is at the same time, though it does have the implication of that being the case. It's gonna be a lot easier to clean up. I think we're not gonna need damage to controlled to come in, even though there were some car wrecks, but it's not going to be as big of a deal as the big blue skylazer and the Chitari showing up again. I was glad that we have that little joke of the Punisher about to swear and Spidey shoots the web over his mouth. That's a very comic book to me.

I also like that it's the Punisher that is the one that ends up breaking the spell but also fucking it up and shooting Spider Man at the end. It's like guns aren't always the answer, but they aren't. Just the way that he manages to have Jean stop with that moment, the way that Spider Man saves her and sacrifices himself, and I really like that stupid moment where the Punisher puts on Spidey's mask and is dancing around like an idiot up in the hospital room and Spider Man gets to go out amongst the people as Peter Parker and see the love that he gets, which up until this point, all of these Spider Man movies, I don't I know we had Spider Man Day and one of the I think it was the first Spider Man film.

I don't think it was in the third one, but you know, we've seen some celebrations, but this to see all of those people pulling for him, and him amongst the crowd, that little kid that makes eye contact with him and does the web shooter fingers, it all just hit perfect for me. I agree. I think that getting a genuine emotional moment out of the Punisher, one of the more gruff characters in the MCU, is really smart because you pair him opposite Tom Holland as Spider Man. And you know what, I think there's always been this question, who is the analogue in Marvel for Superman in the DC universe. I would make the argument at Spider Man, we have a character who when he's not superpowered, is just trying to live a normal life, which both Clark Kent and Peter Parker are trying to do.

And then when they are their superpowered versions of themselves, they are adored by the city that they live in. And obviously Superman the whole world in a lot of those comics where he's saving the world, but in the comic book of Spider Man, he's friendly, neighborhood Spider Man. He's adored by the city. They give him the key to the city. I love that, and I think that this movie cements Spider Man as that character in terms of the ability to bridge the gap between what the MCU was and what the MCU I hope is moving forward, which is character stories about characters that actually have some emotional resonance to him.

We saw it with Thunderbolts. There was a whole the whole climax of that movie took place inside of a character's mind. We saw it a little bit in The Fantastic Four. The whole movie is about four people learning to be a family together. And what does that mean.

I think we might actually be trending in a direction with the MCU that is hopeful in terms of maybe not just being Joss Wheden quip equips. Let's make a joke and then the quip. Afterwards, we watch Supergirl I watched Superman last year. Superman was good. I don't know if James Gunn can do another movie like that anymore, where it's like emotional moment and then equip people are actually ready to have an emotional moment with these characters.

Stop undercutting them. And this movie doesn't undercut them. Like you said at the end of the movie, there's not some quip when Spider Man looks at that kid in the audience. It is an earned moment, like the MCU has not gotten in a really long time. And I want them to continue that because with Doomsday, they have an opportunity with Doomsday as a character to pull a fanos and give us a villain to actually maybe not root for, but understand his motivations in a way that don't just make him be a mustache twirling villain.

And my hope is with Doomsday is they are able to do that because Robert Downey Junior is that good of an actor. He's been able to do that before, and all of the actors in these movies are great actors in their own right. Tom Holland is a great actor. You can't bring this level of emotionality in charisma, and I think vulnerability to a character if you're not a great actor, and he is. It's interesting with that third Guardians of the Galaxy movie, so much of that is the whole idea of the Gomorrah in that not being the Gomorrah the Peter new and trying to re spark that whole thing.

It's a little similar here with this Mary Jane, even though she is the same Mary Jane. But what I wanted to say was when Peter sees Doctor Doom without his mask, he's going to lose his fucking mind. They all are, but especially Peter. I think that's why essentially the they I don't think they said tom Alin is going to be in Doom's day. So that's the thing that I almost said to my wife yesterday.

But again, she's so far out of the loop that she doesn't know about Robert Downey Junior coming back. So that's going to be her surprise when we go to see Doomsday. She's not going to know until the mask comes off, and then she's going to be like, what the fuck? So she doesn't know that Robert okay now, and I wonder how many people don't at this point, because I know some people were okay, which is it's. Really weird to me that people don't know.

But yeah, I was talking with one of my coworkers and they were surprised that Doctor Doom showed up at the end of the Fantastic Four and then when I said, oh yeah, Robert Downey Junior, They're just like, what what are you talking about? And I was like, oh shit, I just ruined it for somebody. But I was like, this was after the press conference, this was after the empty chairs, this is all of the stuff that was leading up to this. I was like, okay, I was really surprised, and I think we talked about this on the Fantastic four episode. I was surprised that they're there wasn't a one quarter face turned, so we've got to see a little bit of our DJ's face that could have been anybody in that cloak.

But I'm glad now that there might be people that don't know who that is, and maybe they will be surprised though. We've got, however, many months before the movie comes out, and they're going to be just touting that like fucking crazy. It's going to be our DJ all over the place from now on. I don't know if that will be the case, because I guess it's hope ceiling that they are not going to do that because the moment in the movie where that happens, I think, like you've already alluded to, is going to be a moment that needs to be seen in the movie, and they won't spoil it in the trailers. I think that's going to be like the Jean Gray thing, They're just not and I joked about like the doomsday trailer already, like it kind of looks the Doomsday trailer has no substance to it.

It is all just it's just a bunch of shots with no context. My assumption is that's intention I know it's intentional, obviously, but I'm assuming that the intentionality behind it is because so much of the movie is going to be things that you have to see in the movie because otherwise it's a massive goddamn spoiler and things that I'm not even going to talk about here because I know you don't watch any of that stuff or keep up with any of that stuff, so I don't even want to possibly ruin it for you or anybody else, but to say that the things that have been talked about that have been confirmed just by the comic con of it all, with like certain actors being on stage, but other actors haven't been on stage, and like who knows who is going to be in that movie that they haven't said, And I think that's why so much of the movie has not really been shown in the trailers.

And my hope is they don't show RDJ as Doomsday or as Doom until the movie. I hope that we don't get that until maybe the week after, because they always do like a spoiler trailer right before the movie comes out. I hope that we don't see a single shot of him AND's mask until a week before the movie comes out, or if not, after the movie's come out, genuinely because there's no point. No. I really hope that as well, because yeah, they just seems bound and determined to ruin all of this stuff for everybody.

I'm like, no, just let things be surprises, please. Doctor Pearl Mutter says it best, like it's a study. It's factually known that American audiences don't want to feel dumb, which is why movie trailer houses do that. They don't want to feel like they don't know what's going to happen. In the movie, So the trailers are just spoiling things ahead of time.

And for the rest of us that don't care about feeling dumb when you go into a movie, it then forces us to not watch trailers for things, because the trailer will show the entire movie. And if you're a discerning moviegoer, i e. Someone who goes to a couple movies a year, you can pick up on the entire plot of a movie just by watching trailers at this point, genuinely, like entire acts of the movie are segmented in the trailer at this point, and it's just it ruins things, It really does. So does. I just saw an article or listical the other day where I was talking about the biggest reveals in movies over the last I don't know, however many twenty years or whatever, and one of those was Shutter Island, and I was just like, bit China from the trailer, what was going on with that thing?

I didn't need to see that movie? And it was a dream? Yeah, that was all him going crazy. And I like the idea that it wasn't all a dream, but that makes the movie somewhat more tolerable than it actually is. Oh, I wonder if anyone's gonna have a hot take on that one.

He doesn't like Shutter Island. Where's all your Shutter Island fans going to bat for that movie? People going to bath for Supergirl. Talk about a distinction between two movies starting with an s released within a month of each other. My god, this movie has made almost a billion dollars already.

People will show up for your movie. It has nothing to do with the fact that a woman is in it. I promise, I promise. It's not a well made movie. People showed up for Superman last year.

That movie made a boatload. This movie's made nine hundred million dollars. This Spider Man movie is If you put a good movie on screen, the audiences will show up. And this movie probably won't have a thirty to forty or fifty percent drop off next weekend either. It will probably have maybe a surge even there might be people who want to go see this again.

I don't know. This is a really good movie that I think will resonate with a lot of people, especially people that are big fans of Spider Man, which is most everybody who's into these kinds of movies. Spider Man really is the character that crosses all boundaries. He's very bipartisan. I think people that like DC like Spider Man, like how could you not?

Yeah, but I'll tell you racially, it was very even in the theater yesterday, if not more black people than white people, which I was just like, Oh, that's cool that. I'm just very glad. I was surprised at how many kids were in the theater. I don't really think that this was a kid's movie, and is. A kid's character those I mean, he's like kids.

He is, And ask for any little kid who's your very superhero, they're probably gonna Spider Man. I was surprised at how many people were wearing their spider gear, not costumes, but like all the T shirts and stuff. It was really nice to see that, and it was nice that it was a pretty respectful audience. Everybody seemed to be into it. There's only one time I had to yell at somebody for use in their phone.

But yeah, it was a good theatrical experience. I think it was made even better by me coming in late and missing all the pre show, missing the MJR. Theme. That's our theater around here that we go to is mjr. And they play this trailer up front.

It's not as bad as the Nicole Kidman trailer, but it's been going since the Pandemic, and so that's six years. I've been seeing them take away a year for the Pandemic, but that's five years. I've been seeing this little trailer before the movie. Every time they send me a survey after a movie plays, I just go on and on about how they need a new pre show, but they have it to listen to me. I went through and purposefully tried to find bad reviews of this film just to see what people are critiquing criticizing about this.

Seems like people don't like how angsty Spider Man is. I find it to be actually a good thing, especially that he's having a real crisis of faith and having the being alone in this new world. I figure, if there's any time for him to be angsty, it's right now. The other thing was something that we've talked about is a good thing, which is the whole idea of him interacting with other superheroes. I don't feel that they do it too much.

I guess the consensus amongst some of the online cogniscendai is that there's too much of other characters in this movie, But to what extent You've ever read the comics and it's all self contained and he doesn't interact with other people or other superheroes in the comics. As long as the character can be drawn and is within the scope and license of the publisher, they can put Hulk in Spider Man comics. Advice versus. The only reason it's hard to do it in the movie is for a whole host of reasons scheduling getting the actor there, unless you're just doing abomination. And I don't mean the look of it, but tim Roth thing where it's just, oh look, it's just abomination.

Remember when tim Roth played that character, and then obviously they did it again because he wasn't in Shang Chi. Tim Roth wasn't abomination was but tim Roth ended up being in that Sheeholk show. So you can do that in the movies of a certain kind, but it's so much harder than it is in the comics. So whenever people have said anything about that, my response, especially with the character like Spider Man, is have you ever read a Spider Man comic before? Other characters show up all the time, all the time exactly.

And that's what got me into a lot of different comics was going back to Secret War the very first one. And I didn't even know for a long time that they had done other Secret War storylines, because for me, it was a one and done. It was a bringing together of all of these different heroes and villains because there were all the villains there, and it was a way for me to experience other characters that I wasn't that familiar with. But the thing that really got me was reading the panels and seeing the little asterisk next to something and then down below it says see Daredevil twenty five or see Fantastic four, two fifty two, any of those type of things where you're like, we're getting any marketing, baby, exactly.

And this is before Like at that point when I was reading comics, I think there were three Spider Man comics. There was Amazing, Spectacular, and then maybe web of and I think one of those was just all repeat to his old issues that they were re releasing. Basically, I think that might have been web But then you would get spectacular and amazing and those stories would go back and forth, which I wasn't actually a fan of. I was. I just want to choice as much Spider Man.

I don't need the same story, just stretched out a little bit more. That changed when it was like the Hobgoblin and everybody who's trying to figure out who the Hobgoblin was. But now it's impossible because you've got so many things, and they're constantly going across so many comic books, and it's just like I can't afford to buy every single one of these books. Especially I was buying comic books when they were sixty cents, seventy five cents. Once I got up to a dollar, which I know is cheap now for a comic book, I was out.

I don't even know where you can get a comic book for a dollar maybe other than half rice books right like the bargain bin or a garage sale. New comic books are like five to six books. I will tell you. If you want to read comic books the way I do it, get the Marvel app on your phone or iPad or I guess maybe it's on browser and you could just it's like Netflix for comic books. You just read it as much as you like and there's not any cap on it.

It's ten fifteen dollars a Month's probably more expensive than it used to be, like most things, but I don't think this movie leans too heavily on the crossover of it all. I think, for me, look, X Men is the ultimate crossover movie in a lot of ways. Then the characters are all their own characters in their own right, and anytime they come together for an X Men movie, I'm like, oh, this is a massive team up movie because a lot of these characters could be their own thing. This is the first time Jean Gray has been in a movie without the other X Men. I'd like to point out this is it's such a wild way to use Jean Gray because she feels so novel and interesting, and hopefully that's one of the expectations from Kevin Figy with the new X Men is this needs to feel different.

It can't just be Professor x a Magneto there at the school together. Nobody wants to see that again. Give us something else, do something else with it, and I think this is that step in that right direction. I don't if you want to complain about that. Jean Gray being in this movie cool, but it just seems like a non issue.

Maybe take Black widow out of this movie. But I like that we get to see Florence Pugh and Tom holland Cheri scene together. So shut up, Jesus, I'm the critical one here. Fuck fuck me the people being I don't like the fucking cry. Have you read a spider Man the Ultimate Spider Man video game?

There were levels where you fought Hulk and Venom and Wolverine, and like, all these other characters are showing up. Chill the fuck out. If you've never read a Spider Man comic, go read a spider Man comic, because he does not exist in a vacuum. None of these characters do. Do you know what the best thing about a crossover is, Chris, is that you of the culture cast get to join me on the projection booth, or me of the Projection Booth gets to join you on the culture Cast, and you don't know which one you're listening to exactly.

It's right, it's technically both. I don't have a lot of issues with this movie. I actually don't think a lot of other people do. This is probably going to be one of the best MCU movies that has ever come out, and I think you might agree, though it is a little recency bias. I think it's the best movie that's come out since Endgame.

These movies can change and get better, and I think if the next MCU movie is three quarters as good as this movie is just seventy five percent of the way there, I think it will be one of the top ten MCU movies that's come out, because this movie really, I think sets the standard and the bar very high moving forward. And I also think Destined Daniel Cretin should be given a lot of credit here for how good this movie is. He is a great director. I think he is going to have an opportunity now to go do whatever the fuck he wants, given that this movie has made a boatload of money. But and guess what, He's not just another white director hired by the MCU.

He is a Hawaiian who has made his name doing other things and then did Shang Chi and then five years later did this and Wonder Man, which they just canceled unfortunately. But I genuinely I know people like to say we drag a lot of movies, but maybe drag us for being too effusive this time. See how that feels. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining me on this very special crossover. Do you want to tell the folks where they can hear us all the time.

Yeah, they can hear us over at Weirdingwaymedia dot com, where our audio empire continues to band with such great shows as the upcoming Harrison Ford show. That's a crossover with my show, The Culture Cast. Mike showed the Projection Booth and Richard Adams show the Paranormal Bookshelf of Richard HadAM, which is not the name of the show. It's Richard Adams Paranormal Bookshelf. Boy, I guess I lost fifty cents and then made a dollar in that phrasing right there.

I lost the money that he normally gives me. But to that crossover show is the founded weirding Way Media, along with Susan Lambert, Adam's eighties TV Ladies, Jamie Bennings, Filmentrees, Emily Intraravia is The Feminine Critique, and so many more, along with new shows coming out towards the end of this year. And yes, Mike and I will be covering Doomsday when that comes out, obviously, and that's the next MCU thing. Yeah, that's where you can hear us. As for other things my Patreon at Patreon dot com slash culture cast and Mike's Patreon Patreon dot com slash Projection with her where you can go to kick a couple dollars our way.

If that Harrison Ford podcast sounds exciting to you, Win it launches here in a couple weeks. That's where you'll be able to hear it a month early ad free, So go do that if you're interested in that. And Richard Adams Patreon as well, Richard Adam, I guess Patreon dot com slash Richard Adam. So yeah, that's where you can go to find the three of us. And yeah, make sure to come back for the next episode of either of our shows.

And definitely in December we talk about Doomsday. Spider Spider Man whatever a spider name sper Win sad that job did the Spider Man. Strong Disco ready to you know? Actually from a friend. Overhead.

Spider Man a. Crime you right, the man in spider the man frand the neigh of the Spider Man will. As you when you come to fire. Have to see lever crime like the. Stream the busy Spider Man in Spider Man friend the name Spider Man, what action you want to he like it.

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