A magic trick, performed at enormous expense: you watch the hands the entire time, you know it is a trick, and still, at the end, your wallet is somewhere across the room and you are applauding.
By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXVI · 7 minI do not go to the movies. I am summoned to them. And I arrived at Spider-Man: Brand New Day the way I arrive at everything — expecting nothing, prepared to be disappointed with great elegance, one glove already half-removed in anticipation of the exit.
I did not exit. That is the first thing you should know, and it costs me something to admit it. The film is good. Not good the way a committee decides a thing is good, in a beige room, over lukewarm water. Good the way a magician is good — you watch the hands the entire time, you know it is a trick, and still, at the end, your wallet is somewhere across the room and you are applauding.
Because make no mistake: this is a magic trick. A very expensive, very beautiful, very shoppable magic trick. And I, who trust no one and covet everything, am here to tell you exactly how it was done to you.
They gave the man an army of ninjas
Let us dispense with the plot, which the film has the good manners to keep simple. Peter Parker is broke. Anonymous. Unmoored. They have taken his money, his memory of being remembered, and — most cruelly, and I say this as a connoisseur of cruelty — his contacts. He is a young man in a great cold city with nothing but his hands and a reason to use them.
And use them he does, against an army of red ninjas — The Hand — which is, and I will not be moved on this, the single most correct decision anyone has made in a superhero film in a decade. Spider-Man against a legion of ninjas. Do you understand what has been given to us? Somewhere a studio executive said the word "ninjas" out loud in a meeting and was not immediately escorted from the building, and for that small mercy I am, briefly, a believer in institutions.
The numbers agree with me, which is rare and which I resent. The critics gave it 90%; the audience — the mob, the crowd, the great hungry they — pushed it to a franchise-record 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, on the biggest domestic opening weekend in history: roughly $360 million in three days, stepping past Avengers: Endgame to do it. I am not a man moved by consensus. But even I must occasionally stand in a doorway and admit that the room is, in fact, on fire.
That is not product placement. That is a heist, conducted in reverse, in which you leave the building having happily agreed to be robbed.
Hiding in plain sight
Behind the ninjas and the heartbreak sits what Deadline calls a Hollywood record — a reported $309 million in marketing value across some 165 brand partners, the largest campaign ever mounted for a motion picture, woven into and around the film. That is not product placement. That is a heist, conducted in reverse, in which you leave the building having happily agreed to be robbed. I found them. Here are the ones worth your attention — and, where the film permits, your money.
The rules are the rules: only things actually in or of the film, only real tagged links, no invented "movie-exclusive" merch. Product photography stands in until cleared studio media arrives.
I bought the electrolytes. Draw your own conclusions.
I do not award numbers — a film is not a toaster, and I am not a scale. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it lightly. Here I spend it gladly. It is the biggest domestic opening on record for a reason, and it earns the room's roar. My favourite moment remains the ninjas, and I will die on this small, red, correct hill: more films require ninjas. 2026, you have set the standard. Do not retreat from it.
On the shopping — because I am, whatever else, a critic of commerce, that most modern of art forms — the brand deals are real, occasionally tasteful, and precisely as manipulative as they are supposed to be. If you must take a souvenir from this beautiful robbery, take the Liquid I.V.; it is the one thing the film did not have to lie to you to sell. The electronic mask is the splurge, and splurges, like villains, are more fun when you admit what they are.
I trusted no one going in. I trusted no one coming out. But I bought the electrolytes. I have drawn my conclusions, and I am keeping them, along with the glove.