Spider-Man: Brand New Day achieved the impossible and made people stop talking about The Odyssey for a minute. It also kicked major ass at the box office, inching past Avengers: Endgame to claim the biggest opening weekend to date. There are many people in Hollywood basking in the Spider-moment, but Marvel boss and main hype man Kevin Feige is surely at the top of the list.
In a new interview with Variety, he was clearly thrilled about Brand New Day‘s $360 million weekend (and that’s just domestically speaking; worldwide, it racked up a dizzying $932 million). He “couldn’t be happier” and was overwhelmed “in the very best way.”
But like any good studio head, he was already thinking about Marvel’s next moves. He spoke very highly of Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, and it’s clear that thoughts of Spider-Man 5 are already percolating.
However, “Right now, he’s going to rest after that global tour. He and [co-star and life partner] Zendaya are going to take a good and restful victory lap, which they very much deserve.”
Those stars get a break. But Marvel never sleeps, and Avengers: Doomsday is coming to pick up the MCU thread. “For people who’ve seen Brand New Day, they know the storyline leads us into more Spider-Man films and into the future of the MCU,” Feige teased. “It leads into another very well-known Marvel franchise created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.”
Feige also addressed the “superhero fatigue” issue and how it can vary from film to film. Clearly, Brand New Day didn’t have that problem, but some other recent Marvel entries have shown the telltale signs.
“Many things can be true at once,” he said. “I think last year’s Fantastic Four looked and sounded like nothing that had been done in a superhero movie before, and it only [grossed] $521 million. Brand New Day is very directly a part four. It picks up right after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and yet it tells a story that resonates. It’s ultimately about loneliness and the dangers of staying in our apartments by ourselves, looking at our phones. That resonates across cultures and across the globe right now.”
He’s hopeful that Brand New Day‘s resonance will carry over not just into Avengers: Doomsday, but also into that X-Men movie Marvel’s now working on: “When a shared universe works, these are the results.”
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