No, seriously, what is Peter Parker's job in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

The hero’s struggle to make ends meet is one of his most relatable, which makes its absence all the sadder.

By Jarrod Jones | September 7, 2026 | 10:00am

Photo: Sony

Film Features Spider-Man

Peter Parker (Tom Holland) moves into an asbestos-festooned apartment in the early moments of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but it’s clear our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler isn’t exactly hurting for cash. Audiences usually take this for granted—and one month and a few billion dollars later, most clearly have. We understand as consumers of superhero media that for superheroes to function as superheroes, their private lives are either well in hand or a complete shambles. Over the course of his 64-year comic book career, Peter Parker’s personal life has experienced both extremes, though Brand New Day synthesizes the two in a way that obscures one of the hero’s defining traits: The dude’s broke.

Yes, Brand New Day has an emotional hook that feels mature and grounded in a way Holland’s prior appearances as the Web-Head didn’t. When the film begins, he’s thrown himself fully into his Spider-Man identity, to the degree that his biological makeup is being subsumed by the arachnid mutations that allow him to do whatever a spider can—including the ability to shoot organic webs from his wrists and rageful power surges that suggest all is not emotionally kosher for our hero. And it’s true: Spider-Man has resigned himself to a lonely fate as a virtual nobody underneath his mask, deciding to wipe all memories of Peter Parker from existence at the end of No Way Home. It’s the emotional crux of Brand New Day, yet for all it gets right about the character as he enters his twenties, this film suffers from the same story deficit as Marvel Studios’ prior Spider-Man movies: It makes Peter Parker’s life subordinate to Spider-Man’s. As the character ages, certain elements of his secret identity have remained maddeningly blank.

Take, for instance, the comforts of home—including the paying of bills—provided by his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Those are gone. Ditto his connection to Marvel’s Mr. Moneybags, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), who is now dead in the Marvel Universe (this one, at least), and wouldn’t remember Peter Parker even if he wasn’t. That means: No Stark Industries Spider-Suit with schmancy AI helper; no hypothetical Stark-financed stipend to keep Parker’s lights on; no potential financial boost from his aunt. Everything Peter Parker doesn’t have in Brand New Day—including, we must presume, a Social Security number (Does he sign a lease? Pay taxes? Have a bank account?)—prompts the question: Just how the hell does Peter Parker make money? Those Hot-N-Readys don’t pay for themselves!

Parker isn’t exactly struggling. He has a treadmill, a Samsung Galaxy Z foldable phone, and makes frequent stops to buy flowers to deposit at the grave of his dear departed auntie. Stashed somewhere in Manhattan, his secret headquarters/spartan bachelor pad is outfitted with a top-of-the-line 3-D printer/sewing machine, chemicals for his tensile webbing, and tech impressive enough to conjure his own private AI named E.V. (voiced by Naomi Watts). And not to inventory his entire apartment, but he also owns a multi-screen computer array. Sadie Sink’s character puts it succinctly: Parker lives in a parody of a “sad, single guy in his twenties” living space. That’s what he is; that’s how he lives.

But in New York City, renting a space and decking it out as he has requires money well beyond the means of a guy with no apparent job. And yet, Brand New Day makes no mention of how Parker supports himself. There’s no passing reference to a remote tech job, a pizza delivery gig, or any consistent (or inconsistent!) work that might keep this emotionally taxed Parker in the lifestyle to which he is accustomed. Throughout its 145 minutes, Brand New Day makes no effort to address his day job—even James Gunn’s Superman lets Clark Kent shuffle around the Daily Planet bullpen for a few minutes before the main plot puts him in his reds and blues. Emotionally, Parker’s a mess, which is convenient for his lack of a social life. (His closest friends are, in order, Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher and Liza Colón-Zayas’ detective character, Jean DeWolff.) Financially, however, he’s somehow set.

The best Spider-Man movies feature Peter Parker struggling to maintain a crummy status quo, hustling (as, say, a photographer for The Daily Bugle) to scrape together enough cash for rent, food, and maybe a date with his favorite girl. Whatever time he spends earning, he has to steal from his superhero duties, and vice versa. He saves the city, but he’s a lousy tenant. In Brand New Day, the solutions to Parker’s larger problems are always out of reach, which feels right: It makes for exciting action sequences and gives Holland plenty of opportunities to flex emotionally as well as physically. But that engaging, relatable element to Spider-Man—financial instability, one solid aspect that makes Spidey feel like a genuine New Yorker—is gone.

We appreciate Spider-Man because he’s so very much like us: He struggles to pay the bills, disappoints his friends and family, makes a mess of his work and life by attempting to juggle both. Annoying questions about Parker’s work life and cash flow aren’t distractions from Spider-Man’s story; they are Spider-Man’s story. Peter Parker always hangs in there, even when, or especially when, he’s flat busted. That’s what makes him worth rooting for.

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