How Well Does 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' Honor Marvel TV Canon?
The box office blockbuster does right by several of Marvel's small-screen forays.
It wasn't too long ago that Marvel Studios' movies and TV shows were carrying on quite the two-way conversation.
Beginning with WandaVision in March 2021, Disney+ was charged with serving up small-screen fare that, unlike ABC's Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and Netflix's half-dozen Defenders-led series was set squarely and overtly within the same MCU continuity as the popular Avengers films.
WandaVision chronicled Wanda's (Elizabeth Olsen) unorthodox way of grieving Vision (Paul Bettany), who'd perished in Infinity War, and then set the stage for the Scarlet Witch's heel turn in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Matt Webb Mitovich
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier covered Sam Wilson's (Anthony Mackie) official transition from would-be successor to Steve Rodgers to full-on Cap, while also introducing future Thunderbolts boss Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). (We don't talk about the Power Broker.)
Loki (starring Tom Hiddleston) picked up a very loose thread from Endgame, then introduced to the MCU both the TVA and Jonathan Majors' first (and almost last) Kang variant; Hawkeye's Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) became fast frenemies with Black Widow's Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and brought Netflix's Kingpin, played by Vincent D'Oonfrio, to the MCU proper; and Ms. Marvel (starring Iman Vellani) whispered the word "mutant" before leasing us with a big ol' cliffhanger that teed up The Marvels.
And so on.
Marvel eventually throttled that firehose of content, in part by scaling back on its TV projects. Only three live-action series have been released in the past two years; among those, with the un-renewal of Wonder Man, only Daredevil: Born Again is set to continue. Beyond that, VisionQuest — the capper of the WandaVision-Agatha All Along trilogy — is the only new live-action Marvel series with a release date (October 14).
Marvel's TV shows also have introduced characters and concepts that seemed destined for big-screen revisiting... only to thus far wind up abandoned (as I detailed last year for TVLine).
Matt Webb Mitovich
Though a co-production between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios, Tom Holland's Spider-Man films are no strangers to Marvel TV projects. No Way Home, after all, brought Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock into the MCU proper months before She-Hulk (ahem) "smashed" the handsome New York lawyer, and more than three years before the Man With No Fear would be fully Born Again.
This summer's blockbuster hit Spider-Man: Brand New Day shares a lot of MCU TV DNA, by way of characters and concepts last seen on the small screen. But did the movie fully honor all the TV canon it could have? Let's take a look.
