Evan Rachel Wood isn’t among the “Practical Magic” cast members returning for the forthcoming sequel — and she’s opening up about her disappointment. Speaking to “Entertainment Tonight” at the red carpet premiere of her new series “The Shards,” Wood called it “sad” not to be asked back for “Practical Magic 2.”
“It is sad, because we bonded with that cast so much as children, and so to miss out on the opportunity to look at that cast and look at that house as an adult and see the history in our eyes, it’s something that can’t be faked,” the actor said. “I’m sad that doesn’t get to exist, especially for the fans.”
In the 1998 movie, Wood and Alexandra Artrip played Kylie and Antonia Owens, the daughters of Sandra Bullock’s witch character. In the sequel, Wood is replaced by “The Act” star Joey King, while Artrip’s younger-sister character is played by “Game of Thrones” standout Maisie Williams.
The sequel, out September 11, is adapted from “The Book of Magic” by Alice Hoffman, a sequel to her own novel “Practical Magic,” which inspired the first film.
“I read the book and it seems like they’re not following the book,” Wood said. “I think in the book it would have made sense to bring me back; I think in the way they’re redoing it and approaching it, it didn’t make sense.”
This isn’t the first time Wood has spoken out about the film; last year, she wrote on Instagram” “I offered my services, even if it was one scene or one line. I was told they are re-casting. I am sorry to disappoint the fans. It was not in my control or my choice. I would have happily rejoined my sisters.”
Returning cast members include leads Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters and fellow practitioners of magic, as well as Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest as their loopy aunts. Wood, who was 11 when “Practical Magic” came out, counts the movie as one of her very first roles; among the leading child stars of her generation, she went on to appear in “Thirteen,” “The Upside of Anger” and the TV series “Once and Again” before making the transition to grown-up stardom on “True Blood” and “Westworld.” Literary adaptation “The Shards,” on which Wood plays a wealthy L.A. mom in the 1980s, debuts on FX August 5.
Claude Opus 5 “one-shotted” a first-person shooter game with a prompt so simple, and results so impressive, people are struggling to believe it.
Others have rerun the prompt and the results check out.
Matt Shumer, the maker of the Claude-assisted game, calls the method a Gauntlet Loop: give an agent a real bar to beat, split the work among fresh critics, and never let the builder grade its own homework.
Just two days after Claude Opus 5 shipped, AI investor and former HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer posted a video of a fully playable first-person shooter the model had built entirely on its own.
“Claude Opus 5 one-shotted this game,” he wrote, adding that not a single external asset made it into the build.
Now, you may think such a good quality output required a long, detailed, and careful prompt to guide the AI models through the complexities of building a polished first-person shooter.
Think again.
Claude Opus 5 one-shotted this game.
EVERYTHING you see in this demo is custom code… not a single external asset was used.
The prompt behind it ran three short paragraphs, published in full on GitHub. It told Opus 5 to build a shooter at the level of the most recent Call of Duty games, to fan out subagents—workers that each get their own separate memory and a narrow job—to tackle pieces individually, and to keep looping on every piece with a separate, harsh critic until it held up against real Call of Duty footage in a blind side-by-side. The result, per the prompt, should be “utterly perfect.”
That’s a reversal of how prompt engineers have taught people to work. The advice through the vibe-coding boom was to specify criteria instead of adjectives: say what “good” means instead of just asking for it. What should the code consider instead of saying “AAA.”
Shumer’s version does close to the opposite, asking its own subagents to be “utterly wowed,” and leaving the actual definition to a critic Opus 5 built for itself.
That was close to the entire brief. Shumer later wrote that he never specified the renderer, listed the game’s systems, or defined what “AAA quality” needed to include. He has started calling the approach a Gauntlet Loop: hand an agent a real, inspectable bar instead of a vague instruction, let it split the job into small pieces, and route each piece through a critic that never sees the builder’s own reasoning for its choices.
Two Claude Code features carry that loop. Subagents spin up in isolated context windows with their own instructions and tool access, so a critic grading the weapon model doesn’t inherit the builder’s excuses for why it looks the way it does. Ultracode is a Claude Code setting that pushes the model to its top reasoning effort and lets it write its own orchestration plan, fanning work across as many as 16 agents at once, capped at 1,000 per run.
Anthropic’s built-in /loop skill, built for repeated fix-test-adjust cycles, is what kept the run from stopping the moment the game looked decent. Shumer never specified a number of rounds. He let the critic keep naming a new gap and kept the builder chasing it for hours before he closed the session himself.
The finished build runs on Three.js and plain WebGL2, with roughly 55,000 lines of code spread across 11 subsystems. Every texture, mesh, animation, and sound gets generated inside the browser at load time—no downloaded models, HDRIs, image files, or audio files. Shumer’s own published critic log shows the score climbing from 3.59 out of 10 toward just above 5, still trailing the real game every single round.
Skeptics assumed hours of hidden manual coding, so Shumer published the entire prompt and codebase. That’s when the copycats started.
Same trick, three different builders
James Altucher, the former hedge fund manager and podcaster, ran the identical prompt and reported spending “a little over ten hours” and roughly 1.3 million tokens on Opus 5 to get there. His build, Operation Blackout, plays free in the browser and looks awesome.
The developer of Prompt Silo, pointed the same request at OpenAI’s rival flagship instead, posting “Sol 5.6 Ultra with same prompt”—Sol being the top tier of the three-model GPT-5.6 family OpenAI made generally available July 9 alongside cheaper Terra and Luna versions.
Developer Leon Lin tried the opposite move, going for the usual detailed prompt. Rather than copy Shumer’s short version, he set out to “reverse engineer a prompt for this game,” producing a document running some 20 sections deep that spells out everything from ragdoll physics to cascaded shadow maps. He fed that into Cursor using plain Opus 5 on high effort, with no subagents and no ultracode, and the result—a market-street shooter called Dust Corridor—plays in-browser too, and also looks great.
None of the follow-up builds has faced the blind test Shumer ran on his own project. His critic log still shows real Call of Duty winning every round he logged—the bar Altucher and Atom Tan Studio are chasing with his exact three-paragraph prompt, and the one Leon Lin is chasing with roughly 20 sections of his own.
How much of this is actually new?
Agentic coding tools like Claude Code write software the way a supervised junior engineer might: They read files, run code, look at the screenshots they generate, and hand pieces of the job to subagents and critics that check the result against a stated goal. That loop is real, and Shumer’s Gauntlet Loop is a genuine way to structure it. None of that, on its own, proves the model designed a game from imagination rather than recombining code patterns it had already absorbed.
Three.js ships its own pointer-lock camera controls as an official example, and that base pattern—mouse-look, WASD movement, raycasting for gunfire—has been forked and tutorialized across GitHub, gists, and dev forums for more than a decade. A coding model trained on public repositories has almost certainly seen hundreds if not thousands of near-identical shooters before it ever read Shumer’s prompt.
That doesn’t make Claude of Duty fake, but it makes “built from scratch” a harder claim to fully credit, so take those results with a grain of salt.
Researchers who study code-generating models have a name for the broader issue: data contamination, when a model does well on a task mainly because near-identical examples already sat in its training data, not because it reasoned out something new.
None of the first-person shooter builds published a check for that kind of contamination. Shumer’s own repo does contain Claude’s own creativity, if it’s fair to call it that way. That’s a reason to read “one-shotted a AAA game” as a capable agent working inside one of the most heavily documented genres in programming, not as proof an AI designed a shooter with no prior art to lean on.
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“I’m just fully ready to get it out there and see who’s mad at me,” Barone tells Variety over Zoom with a sly smile. For the comedian and actor — who got her start in the New York City club scene before breaking through with comedy podcasts “Obsessed” and “Ride” alongside collaborator and bestie Benito Skinner — this moment has been a long time coming.
Over the past two years, Barone had been workshopping material for a potential special while touring, and decided last summer to start putting feelers out to buyers. Then, things happened fast — a few weeks after an L.A. gig in August, Netflix called.
“I don’t feel excitement very much, but that was a moment where I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is actually happening,’” she says. “It’s such a career milestone for any comedian and I just felt like, ‘Woah, they said yes.’”
But that doesn’t mean that Netflix is safe from being the butt of Barone’s jokes. In the first 10 minutes of “Galaxy Brain” — filmed at New York City’s Skirball Center in March — she razzes the streamer for the rarity of women-led specials and riffs on their advice for winning over viewers. It sets the tone that Barone is willing to go there, and over the next hour, no topic is off limits as she tackles bad behavior from the men in her field, Ozempic, sex, politics and more.
“I’m sure some of [the jokes] will be a little bit shocking, but I think women and queer people get shit on enough,” Barone says. “And it’s time to shit on people back.”
Below, Barone tells Variety more about “Galaxy Brain” (out now on Netflix), making jokes she wouldn’t be able to say online and what’s in store for Season 2 of “Overcompensating,” the Prime Video comedy series she co-writes and stars in with Skinner.
Mary Beth Barone before the “Galaxy Brain” taping.
SIDEWALKKILLA
What was your process for workshopping material for the special, and how much did it change?
When I first started doing the hour, I would say it was probably 90% different material. Obviously, our lives are constantly changing and I always want the set to feel current but also sort of evergreen. So if there’s any topical references, just making sure that will be relevant whenever it comes out and as long as the special is available — I guess until we all drown from global warning when the sea levels rise. It’s a tough process because sometimes there’s jokes that you love that just weren’t playing as well. But I wanted to balance anything topical with things that happened a really long time ago, so the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, for example, or Jack the Ripper, things like that that are sort of timeless in their own way. I think one of the only super topical references was “Wicked,” and I thought about changing that out to be something that happened more recently — but then I just thought like, “Wicked” is forever.
You don’t hold back in “Galaxy Brain.” In the beginning of the special, you point out how rare it is for women to actually get Netflix specials and share advice they gave you for winning people over within three minutes. Why was it important for you to cheekily call that out?
They were really great about… they didn’t have me cut anything. They definitely gave me some best practices — that thing about getting people’s attention in the first three minutes was an actual conversation that we had. And I’m a good student, so of course I was going to try to do that. I used to have a joke in the beginning of the set that was poking fun at cities that aren’t New York, L.A. or Chicago, and they said, “You have three minutes to catch people’s attention, to win them over. You don’t want to alienate them right away.” So it was genuinely me on tour trying to figure out what to say in three minutes to make people want to keep watching, and working that into the set just felt really natural.
I think there’s a lot of edgy moments in the special. I want it to feel cheeky and also like, stand-up is such a specific performance piece that I can’t imagine going on stage and just launching in and not acknowledging the moment — that we’re all in a room together and I have a microphone and I’m going to try to make you laugh now.
Do you think the situation for women in comedy is improving at all?
The internet, of course, has done really, really good things for comedy and then some not so good things for comedy. But what’s great is it’s made comedy more democratic, because people can start with live performance and post online and then they create their own audience; the right people find them. And I think that’s translated into having more women and queer people who are stand-up comedians that can tour and support themselves financially. That’s been really fun to watch since I started comedy, when it was dominated by the club scene and if you couldn’t get in there and work your way up and be one of the boys, there was less opportunity. Now with all these indie venues — especially in New York and in so many other cities like Pittsburgh, Denver, Chicago — it’s been wonderful to be surrounded by more and more women and the LGBTQ+ community, because those are the people that I want to make laugh and those are the people that I want to be friends with.
You also don’t shy away from calling out male comedians.
They’re some of the worst people that we have!
You mention specific people, including Chris D’Elia, and later jokes mention J.K. Rowling, Woody Allen, Mark Zuckerberg and more. How did you decide who to call out specifically?
I wanted to strike a balance between cultural references and general experiences and moving through the world with my unique point of view, but there were just certain names that I felt like belonged in the canon of this special. What I try to do is write the joke about that person that no one else would or could write. So I do hope that’s where I landed with these ones, and I’m sure some of them will be a little bit shocking, but I think women and queer people get shit on enough and it’s time to shit on people back.
Mary Beth Barone in “Galaxy Brain.”
Courtesy Netflix
There are some jokes in the special that you say you wouldn’t be able to post online, including one about Ozempic that riffs on Kim Kardashian’s infamous “get your fucking ass up and work” quote — which she said to Variety, by the way. What’s the line for you when it comes to risky jokes and possibly offending people?
Here’s the thing about that — I understood what she meant and I think it started a conversation. And that, to me, is a successful interview.
With that joke specifically, part of what is so almost absurd about it is that it probably will end up online with a comments section, and that’s just part of putting out a special these days … But I think for me it’s like, of course I’m going to explore uncomfortable topics at times, but I don’t find joy or feel a sense of accomplishment punching down. I always want to feel like my jokes are punching up. And sometimes you find just by doing the jokes that they’re not always on the correct side of that line. But yeah, it’s difficult. I want to make the right people uncomfortable, and I want to offend the correct people. Sometimes it is trial and error.
Since the internet is forever, what’s your advice for comedians coming up now when it comes to navigating social media?
I’m sure there’s an instinct if you’re starting out to just post as many clips as possible and try to gain traction that way. But I would say that there’s no substitute for experience and stage time, and the more real-world experience you can get playing off of an audience — you need that foundation because you can’t really fake that.
And the comments section is always something you can look away from. I really struggle with that; I read comments. I’m trying to stop, and I’ve definitely created more boundaries for myself. There’s more and more people that I meet in the industry who don’t have internet access or they don’t use social media at all, they pay someone to post for them. It’s hard as a comedian, because I want my online presence to be an extension of me and feel very authentic, but I know people reach a limit where it’s just not healthy. I can, even now where I’m at, see how people completely lose themselves and their grip on reality … So I feel a lot of gratitude that things have happened really gradually for me. I’m 35 now, so I have so many friends from before, I have an amazing family, I have a lot of support and people that I can surround myself with that are not in the industry to ground me.
I do believe that the age you blow up at is the mental age you can be stuck at forever.
The other side of that too, which we see especially with comedians, is potentially a level of being out of touch where you have to fall back on just being offensive in order to feel like you’re saying something. So my pledge to the public is that if I ever reach a point where I can’t write about something that’s relatable, I just won’t do a stand-up special. I think when you have a totally frictionless life and you’re flying in a private jet everywhere and everyone around you is just saying yes to your every whim, that’s probably when you should just sit back and count your money and leave the public alone.
You’re wearing a stunning dress in the special. Who designed it and what inspired the look?
That is a dress by Jackson Wiederhoeft. We met with their team last year — pretty much as soon as we knew we were going to make the special, I knew that I wanted them to design the dress. And so the references that we gave were the dress in “The Little Mermaid” when she comes out of the water; so fabulous, so beautiful, burned in my brain as a kid. And then Megara from “Hercules” also sort of came in as a reference. I knew I wanted it to be lilac, and it was actually such a specific color that they had to custom dye the fabric and just completely blew me away with what they were able to create. And then on the corset, we had beading done in the shape of the Gemini constellation — because I’m a Gemini — so that felt like a fun tie-in to the sort of overall theme.
I also want to ask about “Overcompensating” Season 2 because I know you just wrapped filming. What can you tease about Grace’s arc this season?
It’s sadder but also funnier. What was cool about arriving to Season 2 was that the characters already felt really lived in, so Benny’s approach was like, what can we do that’s surprising but also fan service? I do think the direction it goes is going to surprise a lot of people, but I can say I have a really wonderful love interest this season and I am excited to see it on screen.
Perpetual futures have become one of crypto’s defining financial products, but DRW CEO Don Wilson says much of what people think they know about them is wrong.
In a series of posts on X, Wilson argued that perpetual futures — or “perps” — are simply futures contracts without an expiration date. The features often associated with crypto perpetuals, such as high leverage, auto-deleveraging (ADL) and around-the-clock trading, are characteristics of how some crypto exchanges chose to implement the products, not the contracts themselves.
“Most of what people think they know about ‘perps’ … has nothing to do with the contract itself,” Wilson wrote.
His comments come as interest in bringing perpetual futures into regulated U.S. markets continues to grow. Several exchanges and market participants have explored launching perpetual futures beyond crypto, though questions remain over how the products should be regulated and whether they fit within existing futures or swaps frameworks. Kalshi, which saw perps trading explode shortly after launching, recently submitted a proposal with regulators to expand its offerings to precious metals.
Unlike traditional futures markets, crypto exchanges like Hyperliquid operate continuously, use digital collateral and can calculate margin requirements in real time. Those technological differences allowed exchanges to offer products with higher leverage and alternative liquidation mechanisms, including ADL, which automatically reduces winning positions when losing traders cannot cover their losses.
Wilson said those design choices should not be confused with perpetual futures themselves.
“I’m not a fan of ADL,” he wrote, adding that there is “no reason it needs to be used for perps.”
Instead, Wilson argued that digital payment rails create opportunities to improve risk management. Traditional clearinghouses generally calculate margin once a day, with market participants often having until the following business day to post additional collateral. Because markets can move significantly during that window, clearinghouses require relatively large initial margin buffers.
With real-time settlement, however, exchanges can recalculate margin continuously and require traders to post collateral immediately, reducing the need for large upfront margin requirements while maintaining the same level of protection, Wilson said. Whether exchanges choose to translate those efficiencies into higher leverage is a business decision, not a defining feature of perpetual futures.
Wilson said the real innovation of perpetual futures is that they eliminate the need for investors to repeatedly roll expiring contracts, reducing transaction costs, market impact and roll slippage while allowing positions to more closely track the front of the futures curve.
He also urged regulators to focus on economic substance rather than legal labels.
“There’s no reason to treat perpetuals as swaps simply because they don’t expire,” Wilson wrote. “Economically, they’re futures.”
Wilson concluded by calling for perpetual futures to be available across a broader range of markets, including commodities, securities and crypto, arguing that they should be viewed as another tool for price discovery and risk management rather than as a crypto-specific innovation.
Atsuko Sato, the owner of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog that inspired Dogecoin, has stated that she has no connection whatsoever with the CATE token projects circulating in the cryptocurrency market.
Sato stated that a post he made on his Instagram account was used without his permission, and that fake tokens were launched using this content, falsely portraying him as being associated with it. The owner of Kabosu expressed his regret that some accounts with high follower counts on the X platform also contributed to the spread of these posts.
Related NewsAnalysis Company Issues Bitcoin Warning: “It Could Still Test These Levels”
Atsuko Sato stated that Own The Doge is the only project she has officially authorized to manage intellectual property rights. Own The Doge acquired the iconic Doge NFT in 2021 and launched the $DOG token. The project also organizes Doge Day events, supports charities, and manages intellectual property rights related to the Doge brand.
Sato stated that he and the Own The Doge team also launched the COCORO token on the Base network in 2025. Therefore, he clarified that the only cryptocurrency projects officially affiliated with him are $DOG and COCORO.
Sato stated that the proceeds from these projects would be used for pet care and for animal protection organizations supported by “withkabosu,” and urged users to trust only official statements.
Political déjà vu as US President Donald Trump says negotiations with Iran are back on, insisting that Tehran is ‘begging’ for a deal. Meanwhile Iran acknowledges that talks are taking place but says it is in no rush to reach an agreement. Al Jazeera’s Mohammad Saleh has the latest.
Ted Lasso is gonna have to book another transatlantic flight. Well, three to be precise. All good: AFC Richmond will probably take care of that.
On Tuesday, Apple TV released the trailer (below) for the 10-episode fourth season of its crown jewel Ted Lasso — this whole thing came so close to never happening. Ted Lasso season four premieres with just one episode on Wednesday, Aug. 5; the remaining nine episodes will roll out one at a time each Wednesday through Oct. 7. Apple has every reason to want to extend this thing — who knows how, when and even if we’ll get more.
After a few years back in the states, in season four, Ted (Jason Sudeikis) returns to Richmond, “taking on his biggest challenge yet: coaching a second division women’s football team,” the synopsis reads. “Throughout the course of the season, Ted and the team learn to leap before they look, taking chances they never thought they would.”
The familiar faces are pretty much all there — minus the men’s players, that is. Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jeremy Swift all return for season four. Counted among the show’s newcomers are Tanya Reynolds, Jude Mack, Faye Marsay, Rex Hayes, Aisling Sharkey, Abbie Hern and Grant Feely.
Ted Lasso is executive produced by Sudeikis alongside Hunt, Joe Kelly, Jane Becker, Jamie Lee and Bill Wrubel. Jack Burditt joins their ranks this season under a new overall deal with Apple TV. Goldstein is writer and executive producer alongside Leann Bowen. Sarah Walker and Phoebe Walsh are writers and producers for season four; Sasha Garron co-produces. Julia Lindon will write for season four, and Dylan Marron will serve as story editor.
Bill Lawrence executive produces via his Doozer Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television and Universal Television. Doozer’s Jeff Ingold and Liza Katzer also serve as executive producers. The series was developed by Sudeikis, Lawrence, Kelly and Hunt, and is based on the terrific, old NBC Sports commercials.
Ted Lasso won back-to-back best comedy Emmys for its first two seasons. Season three was a bit of a regression, and seemed to serve as the natural conclusion for the series. And then Sudeikis had an epiphany.
It’s only a matter of weeks before a new academic year begins, and the struggle to get everything ready to go is real. The cost of that back-to-school list can add up quickly, and that’s why we’re here to help you save some money on those academic necessities, especially when it comes to tech.
We’ve analyzed all the portable PCs that excel in the classroom and picked the top five models that are on sale with the deepest discounts. To learn more about what we look for in an education-focused laptop, check out our rundown of the best laptops for college students, and I’ll be updating this roundup to keep the deals fresh.
Apple MacBook Neo Back-to-School Deal
Apple MacBook Neo
13-inch Liquid Retina display, Apple A18 Pro CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD
Apple’s MacBook line has long been the gold standard for luxe laptops, with sleek industrial design and competitive performance. They’re not cheap, though, which is why the introduction of the MacBook Neo earlier this year was such a seismic event. A budget-priced MacBook is a tough order, but this is a very capable machine that we thoroughly tested in our review. The verdict: Editors’ Choice-winning productivity speeds, graphics performance, and display quality. It redefines what a budget laptop can be. Other retailers have this base model on sale for the full $699 retail price, but buying directly from Apple can save you $100 if you qualify for the educational pricing.
Other manufacturers aren’t taking the MacBook Neo challenge lying down, though. Dell just unleashed its ultralight and budget-priced XPS 13 laptop on the market, and students and teachers can snag a $100 discount through its education program. While we haven’t finished a full review of this model, we do have early impressions from the Computex trade show, where we noted that it’s slimmer and lighter than the Neo at just 2.2 pounds, boasts a larger touch-enabled screen, and has a backlit keyboard. Under the hood, you get an Intel Core 5 processor from Intel’s new Wildcat Lake platform that’s more than enough for schoolwork and entertainment, and the newly designed compact charger makes it even more convenient.
If you’re on a tight budget and need a can-do laptop that doesn’t dazzle with performance power but still holds up, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 3i is a good choice at this price. We gave this portable a mixed review, loving its light weight, spacious keyboard and sizable screen but dinging it a few points for somewhat lackluster operating speed. That said, for everyday educational work, it’ll get the job done. Port selection is solid, with multiple USB-C inputs, and connectivity features zippy Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth. Battery life is acceptable if not epic, and Lenovo’s Rapid Charge Boost gives you two hours of operation on just 15 minutes of plugged-in time.
The advent of on-device AI in Windows 11 with Copilot spurred hardware makers to develop chips that are optimized for it, and Qualcomm was first out of the gate with the Snapdragon X Plus line. HP’s OmniBook 5 laptop uses that chip to deliver speedy performance and impressive visuals. We have a review of the 14-inch version of this laptop, where we raved about its exceptional battery life and class-leading 2K OLED display with HDR video support. At just 2.98 pounds, it’s light enough to carry from class to class all day, and the keyboard and touchpad are both comfortable and responsive. Amazon has this loadout on sale for 13% off right now, but we’re not sure how long it will last at that price.
If you’re really looking to splurge, this $500 price cut on Samsung’s exceptional GalaxyBook 6 Pro will get your student the Windows portable of their dreams, with sleek styling, awesome performance and stellar battery life. In our review, we gave this unit an “Excellent” rating, and noted that it’s a real competitor to Apple’s high-end MacBooks for creative work. We were extremely impressed by the huge 16-inch AMOLED touch screen that’s bright, crisp and responsive, with up to 120Hz variable refresh rate and enough brightness to use outdoors with no eyestrain. Quad-speaker audio sounds rich and full, and the keyboard feels good to use. Port selection is also a high point, with a surprising variety for such a slim machine.
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About Our Expert
K. Thor Jensen
Contributing Writer
Experience
K. Thor Jensen is a writer and cartoonist living in the Pacific Northwest. He has contributed to dozens of prestigious outlets, including PCMag, Tested, Clickhole, and Newsweek. His second graphic novel, Cloud Stories, was released in 2017.
The 2021 blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Homeushered in a pile-up of villains from the superhero’s past, multiplying the title character by three to even out the odds and extend its embrace across the Marvel property’s modern screen era, dating back to 2002’s “Raimiverse” kick-off. Five years on, Spider-Man: Brand New Day reins all that in to find a more introspective Peter Parker in emotionally bruised isolation following his self-sacrificial decision to save the world by erasing its memory of him.
Directed with adrenaline and feeling if not always an ideal grasp of pacing by Destin Daniel Cretton and penned by returning screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, the entertaining new entry has the good sense to stop banging on about the damn multiverse. Instead, it foregrounds the humanity that has always been Spidey’s greatest strength — with an extra dash of angst. But fear not, that doesn’t mean the man in the red and blue webbed suit (don’t call it a leotard!) is stuck whining away on a psychoanalyst’s couch or poring over self-help manuals.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
The Bottom Line
Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man grows up.
Release date: Friday, July 31 Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Liza Colón-Zayas, Michael Mando, Marvin Jones III, Marisa Tomei Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Screenwriters: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko
Rated PG-13,
2 hours 25 minutes
Naturally, he still spends a lot of time fighting villains and thwarting crime, most notably a threat of almost unprecedented magnitude through which telepathic mind games enable the misunderstood fiend to hop from one host body to the next like a nimble trickster — with help from some cool, woozy freeze-frame effects. Anyone in New York City could be the menace, including those who set themselves up as peacekeepers.
Trailers have already given away the presence of Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, now teaching college physics to students who mostly just want to hear about the not-so-jolly green giant. No surprise that where Bruce goes, Hulk follows. Ditto a terrific Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, who acts like he and Spider-Man are old frenemies though that will be somewhat confusing to those of us without a comprehensive knowledge of the comics.
But there are two more MCU crossovers — one from The Avengers and one from X-Men — that go beyond fan service to bring welcome touches, respectively, of mordant humor and unpredictable danger. Spoiler ettiquette forbids me from naming those characters or the actors playing them, even if they will probably be all over social media by the time this review runs. But if you want to try figuring it out, one quite hilariously treats a Russian bathhouse in Brooklyn as their HQ and the other was often described by Professor Xavier as his most talented student. IYKYK.
The dominant thread, however, at least until full-scale mayhem erupts, is Peter Parker’s identity crisis, which gives a never-better Tom Holland soulful new notes to play in his fourth solo turn in the tights. This is a heavily burdened Spider-Man, rendered more vulnerable by his sense of loss, mourning his beloved Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and pained by having to watch from afar as the love of his life, MJ (Zendaya), and his geeky best friend Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) carry on with their lives with no memory of him.
Peter obsessively rehearses the reunion speech he has written for MJ — “We used to know each other. We were together.” — going on to explain that the only way to stop something terrible from happening was to make everyone forget. But rekindling the spark proves complicated, even as he slowly reintroduces himself into MJ and Ned’s lives, soon after they graduate from MIT and move back to NYC.
In his bleakest moments, Peter tries to reconcile his loneliness with his self-diagnosed new responsibility: “To live alone with the truth.” But his mental anguish is upsetting the balance of his cross-species DNA, first with paralyzing headaches and gradually with an internal battle as his arachnid side starts overpowering his human side. That also plays havoc with his control over his web-shooting capabilities, both the old-school organic method and the tech version built for him by Tony Stark.
While separated from his inner circle, Spider-Man has been busy reducing crime to a record low, earning much appreciation from Det. DeWolff (The Bear‘s Liza Colón-Zayas, nice to see you), with whom he maintains a bantering phone friendship. But he comes up against a greater challenge when he responds to a crime alert about a hijacked tank careening through the city, headed for the Damage Control Headquarters.
That high-speed, major-destruction chase is one of several supercharged set-pieces impressively executed by Cretton, DP Brett Pawlak and an ace stunt team. The tank’s arrival coincides with the transfer to maximum-security lockup of the mutant criminal known as Scorpion (Michael Mando), last seen wielding his armored tail in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Or is the Scorpion just a red herring, under the spell of a darker force?
That encounter gives Spider-Man a taste of the mind-control phenomenon that will be the action’s principal driver — described as something closer to “possession” by a savvy insider who makes teasing mention of the erotic gay fanfiction Spidey has inspired. (Maybe Sony should market that to broaden their audience?) While at Damage Control, Spidey meets the center’s director, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman, coolly composed and authoritative), who reveals that they are studying captured villains and their weaponry, with the aim of repurposing that knowledge for law enforcement.
One of Metzger’s success stories is The Hand, a band of red-clad ninja badasses whose destructive energy supposedly has been redirected into more useful service. Don’t be so sure. This group allows Cretton to revisit similar territory to his enjoyable first MCU movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, with some spectacularly choreographed, gravity-defying wire-fu fight action.
All this chugs along satisfyingly even with the occasional patch of sluggishness and the usual overly convoluted plot contortions. As much as the movie revels in the thrill of Spidey swinging between skyscrapers with erratic command of his shooters, the more intimate scenes with MJ and Ned are what supplies the emotional charge.
The dynamic of these three together — and of Holland, Zendaya and Batalon in the roles — has been lovingly nurtured over four films and pays off here with genuinely affecting moments that will have some fans getting misty-eyed. Likewise, the spiky cameraderie between this more mature Spider-Man and rough-hewn vigilante Frank provides an extra dose of heart
The heat gets fully turned up when the identity of Sadie Sink’s character is revealed, at first driven by fury, contempt and manipulation mastery but eventually revealed to have much in common with Peter in terms of devastating loss. Without giving too much away about the role, the Stranger Things star’s compelling performance puts a new face on a familiar character and a painful new backstory to drive her actions, perhaps setting up future appearances.
In addition to the actors, Cretton’s biggest asset in balancing the tone between excitement and tenderness is Michael Giacchino’s excellent score, interspersing melancholy passages that echo the characters’ internal unrest with more rousing action accompaniment.
Whether this latest entry can match the series high of No Way Home’s $1.92 billion in global box office remains to be seen. But it should give fans what they want, which is a good start. And though Holland has not yet confirmed his intention to continue in the role, a cute post-credits tease involving an app invented by Ned gives credence to the closing text card: “Spider-Man will return.” Besides, Brand New Day hardly sounds like a farewell.
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