One of the major reasons Spider-Man: Brand New Day hangs together is that, especially compared to recent Marvel movies, it’s a relatively contained story focused on one hero’s problems rather than multiverse-spanning interconnectivity. To use the terminology of Yelena Belova when she dresses down Peter Parker, it’s refreshingly “small potatoes.” That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t push the MCU forward in ways portended by corporate mergers, but it does mean that these developments are pretty easy to swallow—at least until the post-credits scene once again gestures towards some vague franchise future.
Though the main reveal in the new Spider-Man occurs before the third act, taking a major step forward in integrating the world of mutants into the mainline MCU, the small post-credits scene, a tag right before the lights come up, sets up a strange new frontier for Spidey. This scene, all animated with throwback pixilation, revolves around the Spidey Tracker app developed by Ned (Jacob Batalon), who’s still obsessed with identifying the hero despite now magically lacking any memories of their relationship. His MCU version of the Gossip Girl “spotted map” starts off searching in familiar ol’ New York City, but can’t seem to find Spider-Man. The tracker then zooms out, expanding its search, until the app—which was for some reason coded to include the larger solar system in addition to the five boroughs—finds a suitable Spider-Man…in space.
The reason Spidey’s now off-planet in the aftermath of Brand New Day clearly points to the immediate future of the MCU, just as the tags of Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* also looked to other worlds (worlds like those inhabited by First Steps‘ Fantastic Four). It seems like Spidey will be heading up to the retro rocket that brought Marvel’s First Family into his universe, but it’s a possibility that just emphasizes the strengths of Brand New Day. Keeping the story on the ground in New York, and keeping Spider-Man’s problems relatively human-sized, makes the film a far more welcoming drama and a far more tangible action movie than the majority of recent Marvel fare. It doesn’t need multiverses or Battleworld or whatever other complicated comics things are surely headed to the MCU with Doomsday and Secret Wars.
But of course, as seen during Marvel’s feature-length Hall H Comic-Con panel, this is where corporate strategy is heading. It is inevitable, even for a Spider-Man who spent much of his new movie trying to stave off more human threats like depression and workaholism. Now that he’s nearly nipped some of these personal problems in the bud, he’s being forced to put them on the backburner to help the New Avengers (and all the other MCU second-stringers) deal with Doctor Doom. Like so many of Marvel’s heroes, a larger team-up is snatching poor Spidey from his sad bachelor pad and thrusting him into something that needs a wiki to understand.
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