At the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker went back to basics. Gone was his Iron Spider costume, gone was Tony Stark’s suit-fabricating machine, gone were his EDITH AI glasses. All Peter had was a sewing machine in a crappy apartment, stitching together a homemade Spider-Man outfit.Spider-Man: Brand New Day will explore Peter’s new status quo in more ways than one. In a new behind-the-scenes vignette, star Tom Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton talk about the practical effects used for the movie. Over images of Spidey being whipped around on wires or riding a car trailing a truck with a shooting rig, Holland raves, “This is some of the best action that we’ve had in any of these movies. And we shot the most stunts on the day in camera.”The vignette comes as great news for Marvel fans disappointed with the studio’s recent output. For as much as some love the freeway sequence in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, coherent action has never been the MCU’s calling card. Even the bravado sequences in the two Joss Whedon Avengers movies offer a cinematic equivalent to a splash page, but they had a rubber quality that felt heightened, but not real.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});As the general quality of MCU releases has slumped, complaints about the special effects have only intensified. Reddit users regularly share particularly embarrassing shots from Black Widow, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder to illustrate the general disregard Marvel seems to have toward adapting one visual medium to another. News of Marvel’s mistreatment of VFX artists, culminating in recent mass layoffs, has only exacerbated the problem. So frustrated are viewers that they cannot help but notice a terrible CG effect in this week’s The Punisher: One Last Kill, a special that (for all its problems) features plenty of practical stunts.It’s notable that one of the major exceptions to this trend is the last movie Cretton directed, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. While that film definitely had some murky CGI, especially the climactic fight between Shang-Chi and Wenwu, the actual fight scenes were legible and visceral in a way that you only get from filming stuntmen performing the action. Cretton praises the practical effects in Brand New Day, saying, “Shooting that opening action sequence was really exhilarating… Putting Spider-Man on the street with cars exploding, it’s just so awesome.” Cretton’s comments play over images of a Spidey stuntman hoisted above a ball of flame.Certainly, Sony has cherry-picked the best possible moments to include in their vignette. But the mere fact that they devoted a whole promotional clip to highlighting practical effects shows that they understand the importance of the visuals in their film. Of course, we do have to note that great effects are an important part of a great superhero movie, but they’re not the only part. The first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies remain the live-action gold standard for superhero flicks, and they feature some of the most rubbery CGI put to screen. But we don’t care, because the drama and visual design satisfy us enough that we accept the weird contortions as stylistic choices.We want Brand New Day to usher in a new era for superhero movies, but not at the expense of solid storytelling.Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31, 2026.The post Spider-Man Teases a Brand New Day for Marvel Effects appeared first on Den of Geek.