[SPEAKER_00]: This is Spider-Man of the Marvel Comics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome into this episode of Friends From Work, a podcast about all things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it's a podcast that's hosted by myself, Kyle's going to will, and by long-time friend, who happens to be from work, Robbie Earl.
[SPEAKER_01]: Today, we're going to be talking about Spider-Man brand new day in theaters July 31, 2026.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's directed by Destin Daniel Cretan, which we'll get into in a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's written by Chris McKenna and Eric Summers, and it stars a bunch of people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Mark Ruffalo, John Barrenthall, Jacob Battalon, Sadie Sink, amongst others.
[SPEAKER_01]: Music by Michael J. Keynote again.
[SPEAKER_01]: composer for the previous trilogy, but also fantastic for Dr.
[SPEAKER_01]: Strange, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: Robby, let's kick off this episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're both Spider-Man fans with our first impressions.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your first major takeaway from a film that has so much to talk about?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think it's worth noting you talk about Jikino scoring the other films, Chris McKenna and Summers also row on the other films.
[SPEAKER_00]: And...
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where I want to start because I think as I was leaving last night, I realized this was the movie that I think you and I wanted no way home to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to be careful about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not me hating on no way home, because I think no way home turned into something else that was great.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you remember when we were recording this or on the podcast back in whatever 2019, 2020, and we had come out of far from home and far from home at the very end gives you that little glimpse of spider-man swinging in Manhattan that we had not really gotten yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were really wanting, okay, now he's, he's no longer in Tony Stark Shadow or in the Avenger Shadow, he's kind of out and he's doing his own thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the time, we were a little disappointed when we found out they were kind of veering towards multiverse stuff, only because I think we really wanted a
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of grown-up spider-man in New York, interacting with people in the way that is a little bit more familiar from like a Sam Raimi trilogy background or even like the PlayStation games.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was exactly that in such an incredible way where I was watching it thinking
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, this is, I'm so tired of hearing people say this feels ripped from the pages of a comic book because you can only say that so many times before it loses meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that I was watching this thinking every shot looked like it came from a comic book.
[SPEAKER_00]: what I mean is it felt like this is Spider-Man of the Marvel comics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, this is the first time, this is the first time I've seen that relates so effectively.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that, even, you know, we talked about the, the, the ramient trilogy and how one thing that does really well is set up this kind of weight of the, of the whole city on one guy's shoulders in a way that the MCU trilogy can't because you're introducing him into a world that's already populated by a bunch of other New York-based heroes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what you don't get in the remitrology is the other really important foundational thing in Marvel Comics that goes all the way back to...
[SPEAKER_00]: the first issue of amazing Spider-Man, which is interacting with those other heroes in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a tension there that the comics actually for a really long time handled pretty well and Stanley viewed that as a feature, not a bug.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we see that here where we see Spider-Man out doing things on his own, feeling that and we'll talk a lot about that thematically.
[SPEAKER_00]: in a way that doesn't feel like fan servicy or cameo.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's a actual like spider-man, Hulk interaction where both of those characters feel so true to the versions of those characters that we saw born in the comics 60, 70 years ago, almost, and I just don't think we've ever seen anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I loved so much about the movie, but in my initial review, that was no joke without us talking my number one takeaway, followed by my number two takeaway.
[SPEAKER_01]: My number one takeaway is, it's clearly so inspired by the comics, the panels that he ripped straight out of the comics, but also inspired by the video games.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna talk later about actual moves that we've never seen Spider-Man do that are straight up from Insomniac Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2.
[SPEAKER_00]: which other pride you even referenced and the press conference.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not to mention like the helicopter, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really incredible scene in Spider-Man 1, the video game.
[SPEAKER_01]: So as soon as I see him latching onto a helicopter, I'm like, yeah, I know where they're pulling this from because Tom Hall and said he and Zendaya have played the games.
[SPEAKER_01]: They play him together.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's aware of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
[SPEAKER_01]: Somehow it is so ripped out of the comics and yet it is so firmly in the MCU while never
[SPEAKER_01]: making you feel like somebody else is gonna swoop in to save the day.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it is the best of both worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're getting the lookout side of your window of the MCU where it's like, yeah, there is an Avengers tower.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is Yelena.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a whole coups of professor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Frank is walking around the streets.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are all true things, but also they somehow found a way to make Spider-Man still have to bear the brunt of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was still a personal battle, even though those characters existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it made sense, and the fact that they struck that balance so perfectly, that was my number one takeaway.
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't believe it.
[SPEAKER_01]: My second takeaway is when those characters did pop up on the screen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just couldn't believe how well it worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: From an acting perspective, I think this is Tom Holland's best Spider-Man performance to me, not even close.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also from a chemistry standpoint of like you're saying, like Bruce, Mark Ruffalo was great, but also it just felt so natural to what we know from the MCU.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so to see like the chemistry just went off the charts every time they were in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you didn't walk away feeling like Frank and Peter, like that wasn't one of the best highlights ever from the, and people were nervous about how that would work having the Punisher and a movie like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just like every time someone was on there, I was like, yeah, the Uranus stuff was so fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Bruce stuff was so fun and the Frank stuff was so fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet it was still a Spider-Man movie about Spider-Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I told Candace when I got back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what I appreciated and we'll talk more about this when we get to kind of the greater MCU implications of the movie, but just from an execution perspective, I have felt at times in the MCU over the last two or three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: that some of the of the cameos were feeling a little.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't even know if forced is the right word as much as just like in substantial.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it felt like, oh, it will be fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the marvels.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, yeah, it's fun to have Tessa Thompson show up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it just kind of feels like a, oh, and then we'll have Tessa Thompson here for a moment, just to remind you that she's in this universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you don't get much from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Deadpool Wolverine kind of makes fun of that and and leans into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think here I noticed that you never get a cameo that doesn't earn its place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't even know the cameo is there's not cameo right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's not cameo a Frank.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe with you Elena, but they come back to it a couple.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that they actually use that it's not just
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's Florence Poo.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to throw her in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they, they actually make her somewhat, uh, integral to the plot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like the, the scenes are memorable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I think returning to that character at least once to me makes it feel worthwhile.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought that the way that they approached a lot of DMC references were both more intentional, but also
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of more restrained.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's like the way they used it was still Spider-Man oriented.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it still allowed the movie to function primarily as a Spider-Man film such that I actually, I think that people that have not watched
[SPEAKER_00]: any other Marvel movies other than the Holland films I think could have a pretty good time watching this I think I mean probably some people that haven't even seen all the Holland films because they recap enough there but they really make it as much as I think any Marvel movie has been in a while a franchise on its own.
[SPEAKER_01]: that I'll assist in the MCU, but giving you the fans of the MCU, giving them the things they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it feels to me like the two things, one, it is fulfilling the promise I think from 2016, you know, back when Spider-in first shows up in the MCU, like what people,
[SPEAKER_00]: hope to could happen at some point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not saying that the last 10 years were some kind of mistake or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we've talked about how that trilogy is the most consistent in the whole and in the whole MCU and works to get him to this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: but they got him here and I think that's what folks wanted.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then too, man, I think that the big question going into this movie in a lot of ways was will they fulfill the promise of the the last scene of no way home that
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody was so excited about that direction and I think everybody was at least a little nervous That they were going to drop us into this movie and immediately scrap what everybody was so excited about because Sometimes that happens with superhero movies I want to get to that a little bit later more.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to respond to the first part of that point though My final first impression if you will is going back to your very first thought
[SPEAKER_01]: all of the things that we were wanting to get.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were nervous ahead of time if we wouldn't get those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's just call those out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, yes, I'm with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You and I both love the watch trilogy especially taking them to this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you go back and listen on this podcast, we've talked so many times that from this point now, if they go backwards, if it feels younger, high school, whatever, blah, blah, blah, if they redo the ending of the no way home,
[SPEAKER_01]: Then it's not going to be a win and the original trilogy will not be viewed as highly.
[SPEAKER_01]: But dude, like, they almost went too far the other way in that you got so much swinging time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got so many shots of New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even the credits was just New York shots to show you he's in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got so much stuff that looked visually not sound staging.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like they were actually in a city and doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got so much suit time, which we had talked about, like it was probably more suit time than it was time, home and time.
[SPEAKER_01]: for sure for sure and that was intentional because because of his identity and going all Spider-Man and they built it around that and then I think my favorite takeaway is that it did feel so much more mature he was more confident his quips were perfect the best we've had better than his entry in civil war which I had like before
[SPEAKER_01]: the quips were exactly what I wanted and somehow bringing MJ into the story did not feel young to me at all, did not feel high school.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet the movie was still funny, like our theater laughed a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was like a different kind of humor, but it wasn't any less funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: So to me, that's a major win.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many details like get into that I'll hold off until we get into the meat of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get into the meat of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some friendly feedback.
[SPEAKER_01]: What worked and what didn't work?
[SPEAKER_01]: Give me a detail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just because you brought this up, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and again, they pay this all off really well there with no way home, but then what they do with a here elevates it much further, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was just so much time where Peter was unmasked, and that by the end was starting to feel like, okay, I get it, they want Tom Holland's face, and you know, that's always a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a good actor.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to let them act.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people, he exists in this universe where most heroes don't have secret identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it kind of makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was also, you know, he was supposed to have a secret identity, at least for, you know, the first two thirds of that trilogy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not having, it almost got the conclusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like you do need that to be pretty.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that is, I would say more court to Spider-Man than maybe any other hero,
[SPEAKER_01]: in Marvel or DC, the secret identity aspect, even in like far from home, when Nick Fury makes the joke about you just be fainting an enemy because, right, but even that's like, well, but you're also now revealing it to Mysterio, right, you know, like maybe Spider-Man didn't want to do that, but there's no tension in that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, okay, sure, I'll just take it off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and again, I think part of that is, is it was one thing there and it's another thing now
[SPEAKER_00]: even he, in retrospect, views that as immaturity and like not knowing what the real consequences of that would be, you know, because in the rainy films, there's a lot of talk if I have to wear a mask because I have enemies, you don't have a lot of that with
[SPEAKER_00]: Tom Holland's Peter and that kind of makes sense because he's a teenager, he's got the rest of the Avengers there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't really have the sense that people are going to try to get to the people that he loves.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he has to protect his identity to protect them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But no way home is such a glaring example of what can happen when people do know who you are and how that can spiral that we now see himself correct so hard, which creates the foundation for this whole movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think a lot of what we're going to talk about with this movie that I loved is that whereas some people will want to try to couch this as
[SPEAKER_00]: Aha, see, this is why the Watts trilogy was bad and this is why this movie is what we really need it all along.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's that at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is great in part because of what the Watts trilogy set up and allows it to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this movie, like what we've always talked about, like Infinity War and Endgame doing so well, only makes those movies better in retrospect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally agree because we have so much talk about I'm just going to give you another thing I'm just going to change the subject.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, instead of responding to that visually This is where I want to jump in when the trailer came out I had a little bit of nerves about a couple of the sequences just because I love what they were going for I did feel like I still noticed some kind of CGI type things
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they fixed it between the trailer and this because even the shots from the trailer that I was conscious of looked really good last night.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the best looking Spider-Man movie ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say that because I know a lot of people remember like Spider-Man 2 really fondly, but just obviously given the technology of the day, if you go back and watch it now, yes, it's well, choreographed and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are clearly CGI-looking things that don't look as good, just objectively.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I guess homecoming would probably be the other, maybe far from home, it would be the other candidate.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you don't get a lot of swinging time, and you have a suit that's a little more,
[SPEAKER_01]: plastic feeling like less tangible feeling that this one is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I saw the trailer and there were things about it that I was a little bit nervous about, you know, he doesn't have much of a face shells who kind of see his ears because like it really didn't look high tech.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, it looked so tangible here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when he's wearing it in the bathtub, the mask.
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks like he's really wearing it in the bathtub, which I appreciate because I don't think it always has been that way on every other scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fighting was so well choreographed and this is where you can see Dustin bringing in his Shang-Chi influences.
[SPEAKER_01]: and Spider-Man video game influence is because he and, and honestly, some Andrew Garfield type things because they were moments where he found ways to move him like a spider.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when's the last time we saw Tom Holland crawling on the ceiling?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or fighting from a ceiling and then the camera flips over and now it looks like he's on the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I have chills right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: The jumping up to the top of the cage and then web blossoming down, which is a move directly from the video game, just the way they're able to pull it off.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I never was pulled out of it with, wow, that doesn't look, that looks fake or yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's not, I mean, to me, that mix with like the coloring and the tonal aspect of the visual aspect of New York City.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just really impressed, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really did feel like a perfect balance of what we praised Thunderbolts for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: While still having to obviously do more things that are fake than Thunderbolts?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because Thunderbolts is even more grounded, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's less superpowers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, although I think that, I think this world feels a lot more fully realized to me than the world of Thunderbolts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's totally true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thunderbolts, there are a lot of indoor or kind of like, right, non-desert scenes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And those look amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like they actually went to the desert film show.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a huge props.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, like there's only maybe six different sets that they go to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here, he's having a go through New York, different hallways, different, you know, rooms, different, everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and it feels, I think,
[SPEAKER_00]: The way I was thinking about it visually is it feels like the best parts of Spider-Man 2 in terms of the way you see New York and how real the New York feels, but it feels like the best parts of the amazing Spider-Man 2.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the way you see Spider-Man moving the you know the famous start of that movie that I think a lot of people despite the rest of that movie still view as a high bar visual
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think the swinging, even the swinging that you get, the way they show the difference between how smooth it is with those mechanical web shooters and when he's trying to figure out the organic web shooters and how that show, how that progresses, even as he's getting a little bit more comfortable with it, all of that movement looks so natural.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what was crazy to me is even the,
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the choreography and stuff, it felt real in a way that, there were no moments when I thought, okay, this looks like an animated spider-man figure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, yeah, something around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it felt like you saw him kind of scraping the ground or like it looked like a person that was moving around.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's because it was a person that was moving around.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was kind of the best balance of even in like the lizard fight in the amazing spider man when he crawls all spidery all over him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is really cool, but it looks a little, what would you say?
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks a little enhanced to make it look obvious he's a spider.
[SPEAKER_01]: This when he did those moves felt like no Tom actually did it to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, just it felt a little more natural.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like a little bit toned down in how intense it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, we're doing a spider thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So now it worked there for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did see on the choreography front that, you know, Cretan brought back the Jackie Chan stunt team that had worked on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shunche, I don't know if it was the exact same team.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, unlike how good did that stuff look with the hand?
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, Spider-Man going, got so cool as they're doing stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, okay, here's another little thing that got me so excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many question marks we had from the trailer all made sense once you saw the movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, for example,
[SPEAKER_01]: It looked like in the trailer, why isn't Frank affected by the mind control thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't really catch that, oh, he was like outside of the bubble, like that made more sense now.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were wondering about why does he not have a mask on when he's facing the hand if he's so concerned about his identity?
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you see the movie you're like, Oh, because anyone who's mind controlled has no recollection of what's happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, and Jean Gray already knows who he is.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's no point to like hide it at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, he was still crazy sensitive about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the second he woke up in the hospital.
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes like, Oh, where's my mask?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's his first thing he said.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where about mask?
[SPEAKER_01]: So even that was kind of answered in this weird way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then in the trailer, there's a line in one of the trailers, there's a line from Scorpion that says, you think I'm Scorpion?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, what does that even mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or why did his eyes turn black?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he looked like he got stronger.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of that means sense once you saw the movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: The concerns that I had about it being potentially overstuffed, I, I did not feel it all.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I can always imagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, like tombstone literally had one shot for three seconds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we were nervous at be over stuff because there's but there's tombstone in Scorpion and Boomerang and Boomerang and Boomerang and Boomerang and Boomerang and Boomerang but it wasn't about that at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I thought Scorpion was used perfectly at the one you saw enough and got enough time with which is also following up on one of the dangling threads from homecoming that is one of those few dangling threads and all of the MCU that has not really been dealt with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought that gave him an actual super villain to interact with.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, that felt very spider-man comics, ask in that, you know, he frequently, it's like he beats these people.
[SPEAKER_00]: They go to jail, they get out, he beats them again.
[SPEAKER_00]: They go to jail, they get out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing with most of the spider-man films, historically is,
[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes this huge saga at the end, they probably die, and then the next villain is another movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you never really get that same rhythm where you have a spider man that has any kind of existing relationship with anyone villain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I thought they did that well there and kind of showed in that montage that he had that with other villains too, including the hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: the there will I'm sure be people that are just a little bit less superhero movie minded that will view it as a lot in terms of the amount of of characters and but there aren't a lot of there aren't a lot of threads you know like it's really there everything is is kind of tied into this one
[SPEAKER_00]: plot like this mystery enemy from the beginning and everything else is it's it's about that and it's about Peter's mutation and how those two things are kind of dovetailing and I think those two things dovetail at the end and a really effective way but it's not like oh and then also there's this other thing going on with the Hulk and also there's this other thing going on
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, it made sense why Bruce was there and then it made sense why he was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm with you a hundred percent.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were saying what didn't work, I don't think this, but I think that has been and will be some of the slight pushback.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw a few not as glowing reviews.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were still good, like a three out of five stars from some outlets.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's gonna be from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gonna be that if you're not a Spider-Man fan, or an MCU fan.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think some of those things to them still does feel over stuff, but I'm with you that I could argue that away, not to mention the overwhelming majority.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is why you're gonna see spider-man fans are gonna go berserk about this movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like one of the greatest things for them ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think just like true film fans, that will be one of the complaints.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is one of the things that's back on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's, that's why to me, you're never going to beat Spider-Man too as a sort of distilled, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: who was Spider-Man, what is a Spider-Man movie?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it would be foolish to try.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the point now is, okay, we have a different ecosystem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's take advantage of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that ideal look like in this ecosystem?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think there will be people that will always say, aha, but this is what was so great about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very straightforward.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, like that movie exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love it for what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the best version of that we could get that actually takes advantage of the fact that he lives in a, you know, breathing universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I'm sure there will be people that point out, you know, the Hulk and the Punisher and all of that being too much MCU stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: the really fun thing for me and my theater was that there were clearly mega fans who were cheering and laughing it felt really good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like you could tell their mega fans because they're cheering when Yelena shows up, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you wouldn't know that until unless you were like following all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then I was also sitting right next to a guy that was so excited who clearly didn't know any of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like afterwards, they're just like, oh, they let it be a movie, just a movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it was so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: They let, yeah, Kretten do his thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, they let him do his thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so, he was so fired up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which I would, you know, obviously, if I had a conversation with this gentleman, I would say, they've let Kretten do like, like letting directors do their thing has never been the thing, but you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know how we feel about, you know, misinformed narratives, but but I'm taking it as a positive because it shows me the casuals will also be excited if they don't know any of this stuff I think they're going to be like that was so sick yeah well and and I think that you know what we haven't talked about yet that I think to to me sort of like the honesty
[SPEAKER_00]: When I left, the Odyssey was such a great movie on every level.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we discussed if you haven't, yeah, we haven't episode on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's available.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was the way it kind of coalesces there at the end into a definable take that Nolan has and a message that he clearly had, or that he was seeing in this story that speaks to where we are now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I heard Holland and other folks associated with the movie saying similar things about brand new day in the press.
[SPEAKER_00]: everyone's going to want to talk up the importance of the movie that's about to come out and how it actually means a lot and you know it's a superhero movie so you just never know like there aren't I love almost every Marvel movie to some degree and I don't know that most of them I would not say necessarily had a
[SPEAKER_00]: like thematic thrust as much as they were kind of a, they were plot and character centric, which is fine for what that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was some, I think like Iron Man does, and then Dr.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strange does.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my point is here, man, the whole movie, I was just having such a great time with a spider-made movie,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was going to leave thinking, man, that was just about as much fun as I could have watching a Spider-Man movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then the final scene between Peter and Gene.
[SPEAKER_00]: and bringing me into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very thunderbolt coded.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and in the way that they really do make it clear how Peter and Frank and Gene are all dealing with this same
[SPEAKER_00]: Like kind of darkness and loneliness and like feeling almost like like I think front calls at a sentence and the way that he does the way that you can see and all my gosh and the way that they deal with that and then the way shows this life kid man the the like
[SPEAKER_01]: Bringing Aunt May back for that pivotal sequence was so moving that you rerun the same thing, but now she's talking directly to Jean Grey was, I've chills right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that was incredibly effective.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels, it feels like such an earned.
[SPEAKER_00]: elevation of Spider-Man, where I've talked about how often I think he can get reduced to just like, oh, you know, he's the really nice guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the really good one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that scene leading into the gunshot and then Frank's reaction to that and how viscerally he responds and
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I wish that everybody seeing this movie and I know most people will not have done this, but I wish everyone will have at least seen the first four episodes of Daredevil season two just to get the background on Frank because I thought this was such a powerful performance from Burnthal and I thought that it was such a great place to take that character that I was excited for that interaction
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not expect it to be that media full.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I just, my point being, yeah, yeah, as I was leaving, where this took things, the, the, the fact that the movie actually had something to say about loneliness, even about this idea of does Spider-Man in fact, need to be the kind of, you know, lone Sentinel type guy and what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: And does anyone need to be that?
[SPEAKER_00]: the way that being a good person doing the right thing can sometimes be a means to be punished and how to how to reconcile that and the answer isn't to to last out and do the wrong thing like what what you see gene doing, but it's also it's ultimately it's you know again it's
[SPEAKER_00]: the connections that we have to have with other with other people and that's where I just I kept thinking of the the Odyssey again and how how wild it is that we have these two massive blockbusters both with three the same actors with three yeah yeah yeah just great with the same message the resonates I think really deeply in twenty twenty six.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is why I'm so fired up.
[SPEAKER_01]: You just talked for four minutes, and I kept thinking, okay, oh, that's the thing I'm gonna respond to.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I just thought, I have like seven more things based off that sentence I wanna get to.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna take a quick break.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanna tell everyone that this episode is brought to you by our good, good friends at panel bound comics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Robby, do you have a comic handy by a chance?
[SPEAKER_01]: Panel bound comics, promo code, friends from work,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Panel Bound Comics has been a true supporter and sponsor of this podcast for quite some time now.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Use the promo code, friends, or more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Look at that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you want to say about that one, Robby?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a nice little book.
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, by the little, it's massive.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of three volumes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I, there, there are a lot of fun Spider-Man things you can get on panel about comics right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some things that I, they keep selling out as fast as I can recommend them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will say one, one book that has been sold out for a bit is the chips that are a ski spider-man comic.
[SPEAKER_00]: from the pod ships at Arskie and in the on the bus containing all of his Spider-Man comics today, and that is relevant here for two reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: One, I always like watching to see who gets thanked in the encroach, you know, when they shout out comics creators.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our ski got a shout out there at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that I remember seeing Kretten reading his spectacular Spider-Man series.
[SPEAKER_00]: that he wrote and I can certainly see that, especially again, thematically, but also, I did not know that that would be the case when we line this up, but I think Chip is coming back on the show, soon, and panel band comics is getting a new, uh, a re-stock of that at our ski omnibus.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's go.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of Spider-Man stuff, but that's a good one to look out for.
[SPEAKER_01]: I ask that you check out friends from work plus.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you like what we got going on this show, friends from work plus is kind of almost the purest version of this show because you financially support us, we're able to go into all these things like today or yesterday, having an episode about
[SPEAKER_01]: comics from brand new day, comics that inspire brand new day.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I forgot to mention, if you sign up for a year of Friends From Work Plus, I will mail you a Spider-Man shirt.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, our Spider-Man inspired shirt, the typeface is clearly inspired by the book you were just holding up the side of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where that comes from.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you kind of want that art style in a very, very comfortable shirt, sign up for one year Friends From Work Plus, and I will mail you a shirt for free as a thank you for doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Robbie, I wanna talk a second longer about
[SPEAKER_01]: John Bernthal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something has happened with me in the Punisher because again, I don't have a long running background with any of these characters, but especially not the Punisher.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't introduced to the Punisher until you were showing me Daredevil, and then I went back and watched the Punisher show season 1 and 2 just like a year ago because of a friend from Mark Plus episode, Neil recommended that I did that I would do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even that, I don't think it's like the greatest show.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's definitely some wonky things about the character at times.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've brought that up.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for some reason, I'm now so invested.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I found myself very invested in their dynamic, their relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think clearly then being good friends off camera, really spilled onto camera.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the chemistry was instantly there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: it's such a perfect balance of two characters that really are totally different.
[SPEAKER_01]: A guy who's older, jaded, willing to kill everybody, given up, and then like the eternal, hopeful, optimist person who's now struggling with a little bit of what Frank struggles with, and Frank is starting to see a little bit of what makes Spider-Man.
[SPEAKER_01]: So good.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's like the meeting of the two of them together, the funny bickering, some really good funny lines.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the heartfelt moments, even at the very end, was like a very moving moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then a funny moment with him, pretending to be Spider-Man, which we thought was really clever, but then again, moving because Peter gets to experience that the city does appreciate him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then like a different lens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, man, I just go like he was so good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm
[SPEAKER_00]: that moment that you're talking about in the window worked so well for me because it was funny and it was it made logistical sense too by the way yeah I mean it was on so many levels like it it was great from from Peter's perspective to see both
[SPEAKER_00]: Frank willing to do that and the crowds response to it and how that speaks to his feeling of isolation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then also just a little clip you get from the the room and his kind of like grunting yell when he's doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can tell that he's he's almost got like still like he's he's choked up a little bit, you know, like he's he's joking around doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it, man, I think, I don't know, maybe there are gonna be people that watch that, that are, I don't know, are punisher fans that think somehow that's two.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think everyone's gonna be stuck about punisher.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think casual film reviewers are also gonna be like, that was a great addition to have him there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, I was taking note of that, you know, because John Bernathal talks so much about how conscious he was, that this is still the punisher from like his special,
[SPEAKER_01]: working into this movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I felt that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They still gave them some language.
[SPEAKER_01]: They still gave them the very like disgruntled added one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I loved the, you know, reminded me of the infinity war scene where Nick Fury gets out the like mother and then, yeah, disintegrates.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought that that was, like that wasn't a trailer as well, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the the webbing him up is
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, they found other ways like soft-serve bullsh, you know, like, he says that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, pansy, I don't know, he, like, a lot of like, very frankisms, you know, like not tough enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this might be a hot take.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the sequence from the time that he takes MJ to Frank's hideout, that might be my favorite part of the movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: the dialogue that happens within there, because also, like his identity ring revealed to MJ.
[SPEAKER_01]: And MJ, like calling him out made us, like my wife and I, so, what a great MJ.
[SPEAKER_01]: We haven't talked about this, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I was gonna say.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so excited.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about John Barenthal, and I wanted to, yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about Zindaya, and I wanted to talk about Mark Rufflow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Really quick.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark Rufflow, I thought was so, I mean, my theater erupted to see that Hulk again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Am I crazy?
[SPEAKER_00]: When he was so, it looked so good and he got so big and up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark Rufflow, it was so good to see him as a professor.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought the way he handled Peter was really awesome, like mature.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's explained the inhibitor, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought the way he acted, losing control again, like, afraid of what's going to happen was so refreshing, because you didn't have any, and then something you and I've talked about even from, like, endgame seven years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked about how I got to calm down.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked about how in endgame he says, I took the brains and I took the brawn and I put him together and he
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've been like, well, is that really true because it doesn't seem like he's as strong or maybe as smart, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: When he is those two people separately.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I just thought it was so we're freshing to see, by the way, how about the Easter egg about Thanos?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the question from the kid is that what people were asking all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was such a clutch decision to see that, oh, when he's not smart Hulk, it's a much stronger and bigger Hulk still.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is like this part Hulk was like a mash up in the middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and I'm saying, I mean, I think, you know, this, this goes back to the comics too, where the idea is Hulk is the strongest being there is.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, potentially in the universe, depending on the run, because his strength increases proportionally to his rage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's theoretically no limit to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you wind up with various versions of the Hulk.
[SPEAKER_00]: depending on kind of how keyed into that he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so even like Ragnarok or Infinity War, I feel like you're not seeing a Hulk that's this kind of Hulk or even the Hulk that you saw in like Age of Ultron because he's a bit more like domesticated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think even compared to that, there is sort of a, it's a return to me, and the kind of the size element of the, like Ed Norton film, you know, where it's, yeah, you're the kind of giant the thunder clap.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that that action sequence might have been one of the best MCU man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actions sequences.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe in,
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the shot of Peter holding the Hulk with one hand and holding Frank with the other while Frank is shooting the gun in slow motion being pulled sideways was like, yeah, how can you not, and then Peter swinging through the windows and wrapping him up around the pole as he's going through the skyscrapers, like Hulk hits him and he goes, and then wraps him up, and then then Hulk being pulled down by like
[SPEAKER_01]: 15 tons of cement, but still hanging on.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he ultimately still beats Peter, like a really strong Peter, we'll talk about that in a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got his head still in his hands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he could crush his head.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm just like establishing, if Hulk is pissed off, this is, this is no joke.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which again, I love because that's the way that characters is introduced in the Avengers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like everybody is very afraid of him in a way that you don't always see
[SPEAKER_00]: reflected in subsequent projects.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like this reminder that it is a very scary thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like, again, I like what they did with that in in-game as part of the journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is something that nobody really is capable of controlling period and it's funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: We love all the journeys of all these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: We love them all.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can't deny it's fun when you finally kind of end at a point where you go, oh, that's like the Hulk or that Spider-Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: This will, in some ways, get us to talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jean, although I know you all.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: One more thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I think, let's save Jean for what's going to, how's it going to affect the MC?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: The last thing I'll say quickly is,
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought Zendaya was unbelievable, and that's coming from somebody who was a little bit hesitant.
[SPEAKER_01]: I talked about it on episodes just because I was thinking, man, if they don't age her up, if she doesn't act more mature, she doesn't act more confident if she's very uncertain of herself like the MJ we meet in high school, you know, is sitting in the corner, loner, etc.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I thought it was spectacular seeing her at the party.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was like Peter was already confident, but she's like up here and Peter is down here and then like the way she handled being afraid that her life's in danger, but then still being confident to give the clips back to Frank and Frank being like, I like her and then he walks away and she goes, I like him.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like even though they're disagreeing
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was really moving when she says like that girl.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not that's not meaningful Yeah, I don't I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well and the fake is like the okay, which was so good because for a second I was nervous were you nervous?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I was like, oh, I was thinking like they're already just giving it up And just like getting all of her memory back and so I was like wow, they erased that ending pretty quick And then it was pretty cruel to be like she feels nothing in here for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that weird?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then by the way Peter freaking out and then Sadie saying, well, who's the monster now?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he almost killed her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: For a second, I literally said, I didn't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, I don't have a plan.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, this can't be like a tragic death for Peter now, because he kills her.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be too much overcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I believed it could have happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then is, I mean, my interpretation of the final scene there was
[SPEAKER_00]: with MJ, you know, sitting on top of the high school where we're supposed to gather that gene at the end has used her power to kind of go back and unlock some things in MJ's brain or is it just that or she may be trying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, because like she has the black dollia thing,
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't take it that Gene and Lock things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I interpreted it more as she was just wrestling with all of this now.
[SPEAKER_01]: That even the Peter she knows now, she's only met for a day.
[SPEAKER_01]: She kind of was attracted to or like, oh, I could see how this was a thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she does, she does.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know to have that neck, you know, like I don't know how she would otherwise know to associate that necklace.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Black Dalia with Peter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the fact that Ned at the very end,
[SPEAKER_00]: has the kind of click moment like that's almost like what you thought Peter was going to have with the kiss with with.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right and it didn't work there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't work there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So why did it work at the end?
[SPEAKER_00]: My thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, so after the after the
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's supposed to be ambiguous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's not supposed to be anything that I'm reading into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was thinking that, oh, I wonder if she is going to make it so that she can remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it does immediately cut to gene, kind of looking out the window and smiling, which could mean any number of things that could just be she's kind of at peace now and moving forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do think it could be a clever way of putting a foot in that door,
[SPEAKER_00]: since they did establish pretty firmly like she has zero memory of anything as of the doctor strange spell.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said last thing, this is my last thing before we move into just following up, which is how does this affect the MCU?
[SPEAKER_01]: I also again just want to reiterate, I thought Yelena was so funny, so charismatic, such a perfect role that she's just sitting in the bath house.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love the actual practical explanation from her with the small potatoes, big potatoes.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a small potatoes thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll help you, but you've got to figure this out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's again reiterating, okay, there are Avengers.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're doing other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Peter can't just go knock on the door all the time and say it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a mention it was funny with the hat, the mask, the inside, the bath.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it made sense to me like it was funny but it also makes sense when she's like, no, this is also a great way for me to know you don't have any weapons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's not just her being quirky.
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually do understand that's kind of a forcing someone into a vulnerable position.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it also feels weirdly Russian, you know, like in this very kind of Yelena way.
[SPEAKER_01]: They also started calling her Black Widow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I never heard that before, which makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what I want to wrap with that section.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to say that every time someone joined Peter, I was all in pretty much, because I thought even Tremel Tillman did a really good job with what he was.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's like, and honestly, that the police chief did a good job, Ned did a good job when he was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those people in particular though, the MCU players,
[SPEAKER_01]: Bruce, as Hulk and Yelena, I was like, I just, it did my heart so much good.
[SPEAKER_00]: My only other thought on the, the Yelena thing is I, I just, I do love the way that Spider-Man's interacting with the Avengers now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, I wanted to, I wanted to make sure to say that for as much as Spider-Man has, like, there's been talk about whether he should be an Avengers or whatever and, and he has been, has been great points in the comments.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think like again, if you go back to the original days with Stan and Jack and Steve, it's, it's this idea that he, he doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't really fit in any of those groups, you know, like he'll always be around and he's kind of flirting with joining some, but then he never feels like he belongs and nobody really trusts him fully because no one knows who he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought that that was a perfect example of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he's not even gonna show Yelena who he is under the mask, but then also Yelena doesn't really take him super seriously either.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like again, it really, it defines that character and what I was going to say earlier to transition into the gene point, I just think in general, before we get in specifics, it's crazy to me how much now two decades down the line, almost I guess 25 years down the line from when we first started seeing these really successful properties come out with X-Men and Spider-Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, for the longest time, the big, well-known Marvel names were Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, like if you could have any properties, 20 prior to the MCU, really, that's what you wanted.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think seeing all of that now in this movie, yeah, and eventually two years from now,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, I mean, that's what that's gonna happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like an actual kind of read.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like where I, I think things should have gone post and game, which is to say, I think we're in the right spot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you tell a complete story with that that's primarily based in other characters.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now we're at this point where I think you, you're kind of letting the original A team
[SPEAKER_00]: lead in a way that I don't know that I ever expected, but it's really fun to see.
[SPEAKER_01]: So before we walked into the theater, two of the things that I was nervous about or uncertain about, one, we talked about why introduced an X-Men character right before they're gonna do Avengers Doomsday.
[SPEAKER_01]: And two,
[SPEAKER_01]: should Peter ever reveal his identity to MJ and Ned again, or should he keep them in an arms length?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think different Spider-Man iterations have taken that or drawn that out longer than others, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think that told me with Guyer one, at the end of the first movie isn't MJ like questioning, but she doesn't know, she kinda has a couple looks, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then is it the second movie where she straight up finds out?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the very end.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the third movie, they're pissed in whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: So at some point, I think the practical part of my brain goes, people are going to find out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like at some point, someone's going to see them falling out of a window, like in today's day and age of cameras everywhere and stuff, like somebody like Jean Gray makes sense to me that she'd be able to pretty easily find out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if you really wanted to track him.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that made sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I still have question marks here, but I think they ultimately won me over on all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the Gene stuff felt so natural, it clearly was not an X-Men focused project.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a pretty good way of being like, oh, this is a character that we're going to care about.
[SPEAKER_01]: down the road.
[SPEAKER_01]: But for now, we don't know anything about our background.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know why she has powers, how she got them.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know where she's going at the end with the bus.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just like, and because they were focusing on Peter's mutation, it didn't feel that far out of left field to have another character that is just kind of different in Peter's word, or special, or unique.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I think it works.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought so too.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like I was maybe even more concerned about that than you were
[SPEAKER_00]: the way they used it was pretty key.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they balanced it perfectly.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they had gone too much into this is the threat of the future, this is what's on the horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is made it into this like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, audience, wink, wink.
[SPEAKER_00]: Guess what movie is coming?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it would have taken away from what this is and that was my fear, just because there's been so much talk about that as the new focus for the next saga or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I thought one because they were doing the mutation thing for Peter and because again it also loops in the Hulk who no one is saying as a mutant no one's explicitly saying Peter is a mutant so I think they kind of use it fairly generically here and even Bruce talks about you know any moment powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: or like a universal inhibitor that would work the same for Bruce.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, by the way, my rate, my body sense was going off with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could that be where they're ultimately heading.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it was like seven with the colors and that technology.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which you know, and Peter developed one that worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fairness, they did have something like that already in civil war that was like keeping
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I'm not sure what that was, maybe that only worked for her, but yeah, I thought I was actually surprised that we didn't get a credit scene or another follow-up where it shows them
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, picking up one of the inhibitors that he dropped or shows them mass producing those or something because it's so clearly that that, you know, as soon as like everyone's gone, that guy ripped off is still probably sitting on the floor, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: They make a point to not, you know, the other ones they show them get destroyed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was just thinking, you know, like Mary J. Morons and McGinstit, Bruce Morons and
[SPEAKER_00]: this thing that Peter developed is potentially going to wind up being.
[SPEAKER_00]: catastrophic if they run with that, which is one of my big kind of just following up points right out of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think for me, I ultimately was okay with the identity reveals because one like I said practically, I don't think you can drag it out that long, and the very final shot I know will be slightly controversial that he decides to go back and reveal himself to Ned.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think because the whole theme of the movie was you can't do this alone, I don't think I was anticipating that as heavily.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think by the end emotionally I was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was okay with him revealing himself to net at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: How did that hit you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I know you've been sensitive about that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought, again, I think they, I think they, they earned that moment for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really loved the building legos moment earlier and in the Spider-Man series.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know, I thought that the way they set all of that up, you know, you do need a supporting cast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that is something that goes back a long time
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a fairly recent thing to start having more people in his life, know who he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also think that there's a difference between the first three movies where they were kind of a team like helping him fight crime.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think,
[SPEAKER_00]: My read is not that that's going to be the new situation that he's going to bring them back in and they're going to help him do all of the stuff as much as it is just he is not.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is not cutting himself off from having relationships and part of that means actually letting people know something about him into his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so like my my sense is that this is going to mean he can still be friends with Ned and also like.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm, you know, we don't for sure know that Ned knows that he is Spider-Man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm guessing he does, but all we hear him say is Peter, and you know, he knows the the handshake and who knows how old the mechanics of the stuff play out.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my guess is that it's going to be he has friends, which also ups the stakes, right, because he has people he cares about, because he doesn't have anti-Many more, which is a big, like
[SPEAKER_00]: that was a big thing in the comics for the longest time, like what a fan-maker it's heard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, they didn't double down on any kind of bringing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: May back, we're talking about Uncle Ben at all, or do we start or any of it, any more.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, or talk about, yeah, I wondered if they were going to go back to the origin or something here in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they really did.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of those two friends and it's Frank.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess Gene now a little bit maybe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, Bruce is even a who he is, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: although I thought that scene was interesting too when he what he finally does to get Bruce to calm down right but I was thinking about this too like he doesn't know Bruce does not know anything about up Peter because when when Peter introduced himself to Bruce he introduced himself as Ned
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I don't think that Bruce necessarily knows now either.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean he could probably figure it out eventually, but but he does say he does say like I'm Peter I'm a friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know, but that, but that doesn't mean, but it doesn't mean if he sees Peter park without a mask he'll know that's the Peter I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, but it's just interesting that that gets through on some level.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like I feel like.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you think that'd be effective.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just I don't know that like a random person saying, hey, I'm a friend would do anything to like I think that the idea is that cut through to something and because he didn't introduce himself as Peter earlier in the movie, my sense of that it was intentionally calling back to some, some like residual awareness.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the identity front,
[SPEAKER_01]: This is tiny, but I also appreciate that it feels like we took a step toward Ned not becoming a supervillain, like if they were going to do some kind of thing with his best friend hating him feels like this went the other way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they would have had a chance to lean into Ned's magical sorcery powers or anything, and I like that they just went the other way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry that Jane Gray is going at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's I don't think there's any there's a high reason why we need
[SPEAKER_00]: to know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I guess, ostensibly at some point, they're all going to wind up in an next mansion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, but I think that was a perfect kind of nondescript, whoever picks that up can do with that character, what they will.
[SPEAKER_00]: My question before we get to the spider amutation,
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is Bruce at the beginning of the movie?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is he worried about the monster getting out again?
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that that was
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, so, it's interesting, the last time we saw Bruce in a movie was the credits scene of Shanty, which was Kretten, and we saw him, you know, I think he had the sling there, and then we were wondering how, how is he Bruce again, you know, he's been the smart Hulk, and then in She-Hulk, which I continue to wonder whether they are going to, like, how much of that they're going to engage with, but in, in She-Hulk it's that he uses
[SPEAKER_00]: Jennifer's blood to kind of heal himself again as smart Hulk.
[SPEAKER_00]: So then for the rest of that show, he's just basically back to the endgame status quo.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm curious if you understood how we're supposed to understand that he got from there to being Bruce again and now feeling like he needs to wear an inhibitor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, I'm really good with a lot of MCU trivia.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am a little bit confused about the Bruce timeline.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd have to think about it because we all saw it and as I said, watching these in chronological or release order in our rewatch.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just watch, she Hulk, is there any reason to believe that he couldn't have just made another inhibitor to go back to Bruce, but maybe in making the inhibitor, he's aware that he doesn't without the inhibitor more
[SPEAKER_01]: He morphs into savage Hulk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, well, you know, it is interesting too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, at the, I mean, when she first takes over, he is smart Hulk.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like, visually, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: He looks like the right in the game.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's got the stubble and everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, good point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's only once he's like, often inhibitor and pissed off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's like, I think she broke something.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you see, yeah, in his head, he's so many.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe when he was talking about the monster getting out in the, in the classroom, he was almost kind of joking.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, because that's the vibe of the conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he even jokes to that one kid, remember?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, smash, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in the, and then I think whenever he's talking about, you know, I don't have the inhibitor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm freaking out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's because he doesn't have the inhibitor and he knows that he's real
[SPEAKER_00]: and something's messing with his mind because he doesn't know how he got there and I think he's like, oh, I'm I'm back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm progressing, you know, back to 10 years ago or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And could I also head cannon that maybe he was a little bit inspired by Jen by the end of that and likes being able, how Jen can, oh, that's a good back to being a human, you know, and controlling it more.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe he thought I'll, I'll do the double thing instead of the one person thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do think you're you're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one of my takeaways watching endgame over the years is I do think that what we're supposed to get from that is that he is emerging of the two versions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not Bruce's brain in the whole body.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is like you see him be kind of goofy and middle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, maybe it could be a thing where he wants to get live a normal life and.
[SPEAKER_00]: he in doing that, maybe he is also kind of inadvertently reintroducing the tension between him and the Hulk, like if he's giving the Hulk less time again and they're kind of sure back to this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, and they they've definitely set up that he's constantly tweaking it, you know, right for years and he told Jenna takes a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I it is believable to me that he's constantly working on different ways for it to exist, yeah, which by the way, I feel like that's a pretty decent explanation.
[SPEAKER_01]: for why he maybe isn't in Doomsday at the end of the movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I feel like he's, again, immediately concern that he injured people.
[SPEAKER_01]: He like blacked out essentially, like doesn't remember all of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I could see a Bruce like that going back to Age of Ultron mode being like, oh man, I, or even legally, because he was going to, they say he's going to a psych ward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That even legally, like he can't get out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that they really,
[SPEAKER_00]: They're setting up a potentially really interesting next Hulk story because they really made it seem like he is in a bad spot by the end of that with like the news coverage and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's not just, they have this one fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like now everyone's talking about the Hulk on a rampage again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that does put him in a spot we haven't seen that character in since age of Ultram.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, two other things I'm thinking of.
[SPEAKER_01]: The post-cred scene hit me kind of weirdly.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a weird reminder that, you know, we just got back to a Peter who's in New York and grounded.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it was our reminder of, oh, yeah, the next two movies are the furthest thing from grounded, the most multiversal galactic, whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's clearly hinting at some kind of battle world type thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I a little bit, I roll that Ned's technology could pick up that he's in like some other universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's more just like a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, I was mixed.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't like, oh my gosh, let's go.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it does make sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's setting up.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's gonna be some kind of, we've talked about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Poling out of what characters do we want to continue?
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we want to continue, we're gonna pull you out of there.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna move you here and then something's gonna happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: But just thought was interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So do you think that that means, I don't know what it means.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think one, my sense of still, that if we see Tom Holland's Spider-Man, it is a very end of Doomsday at the earliest thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Secret Wars, he's in, but I don't think he's in Doomsday.
[SPEAKER_00]: The interesting thing about Secret Wars, and there's so much, I'm realizing they're at
[SPEAKER_00]: There are at least two other episodes to come out of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one, one is just kind of next steps and how we think all this plays into and where it leaves everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then also I could do a whole, because we barely got into it, but I could do a whole episode just talking about the comics that they were pulling from here and what they could be setting up in the next movie because I feel like I'm seeing some hints of things that make me excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think just looking at this credit scene from the Spider-Man perspective and looking at the secret wars in the 80s versus the secret wars in 2015, the 2015 one is what makes more sense with what I know about Doomsday where, you know, he's pulling the fragments of the universe together or the universes together into this one planet.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that's kind of what I was thinking we would be getting in secret ors, but like we've talked about the original secret ors is not that the original secret ors is all of these heroes just get pulled to a random planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're kind of, that felt like the post-cred scene more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and that's where Spider-Man gets the symbiote and like we've talked about with that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that is a very different.
[SPEAKER_00]: It impacts the world only in so far as it impacts the heroes that in villains that were taken there, but it's not some global catastrophe
[SPEAKER_01]: And interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way that it was set up there, it doesn't show.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like, like, man, in the wasp or something, where it's just showing like the spider-man tracker and there's no world left.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just spider-man is removed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there is still a world.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so you get the sense that, and I don't know, I think the more I say with it, the more I like that idea, just because like I've said before, I don't
[SPEAKER_00]: I think every time the world faces a like world ending catastrophe, it gets harder to move on and do another small scale story with, you know, like I just think you have to be really, really judicious about that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think if there's a way to do some of that that maybe has implications, but it's
[SPEAKER_00]: That's maybe ideal for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ideal for letting things like the X-Men narrative and all that continue uninterrupted.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if this is going to affect what I'm about to say, but I did like that they found a way to kind of level Spider-Man up a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's always been strong and fast, but this evolution thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when he did go kind of into eight mode and his eyes went all black when he was fighting the hand was pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Really cool moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, the writing on this was great too.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he shot his web shooters and the guns broke the webs up, and then Gene says, isn't that kind of weird that they've been developing
[SPEAKER_01]: uh, a gun specifically to break up your webs just in case.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, ah, Frick, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he goes crazy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the natural webs go right through it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it just it works for me, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's, it's, it's fun to because it kind of such him up as, um,
[SPEAKER_01]: And what he did to Scorpion, he is angry, he is like strong, strong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I loved that scene too because it showed, like it was just the right amount of what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it shows him being overly aggressive with Scorpion for sure right, but not like full blown black suit like he's lost himself entirely yeah yeah and I think even the putting the cop and danger the way he does it doesn't it's like Still believably an accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an accident that he would never make normally, but it's it's like he's he's suddenly losing regard for his surroundings.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is very unlike him, but it's not like he's suddenly going and beating a police officer.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like you, it was a really good way of seeing it be so out of step of what we know about that character that it's alarming, but it's also, it's not so far out that now the, you know, NYPD is hunting for him or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were little things like the way they showed that that I thought made that,
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, just the, again, so much this movie I thought was just the right balance of things that could have gone too far in any number of directions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we'll be right back.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna close this out by combining the last two segments because one from a friend is tough when we've seen it before our friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, don't have a lot of feedback there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it would be kind of fun, Robbie, for our friends from Work Plus subscribers, to call the phone number, I'll send it to you on Patreon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Call the phone number with your hot takes, so that for our reflection episode next week,
[SPEAKER_01]: You can help spur some conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wouldn't that be kind of fun?
[SPEAKER_01]: So we'll play some voicemails from different people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we're also trying to set up kind of a special patron hangout type conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, thanks, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: So hello.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay tuned.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if your friends from work plus subscriber and want to talk about this movie, there may be an opportunity for you to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, and this is going out of order.
[SPEAKER_01]: Literally the last thing is I thought Gia Kino killed it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And here's why you're for doing this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's why, here's why.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was nervous about the theme that they released.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you notice though?
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't play the theme that was released until the credits.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the very last scene was finally that synth driven thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it made so much sense to me in context of Peter Lang on that beam looking at the sunrise and I think he's drinking coffee.
[SPEAKER_01]: It made sense there, but the rest of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought it was pretty magnificent again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found a way to work in that boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
[SPEAKER_01]: He worked in a couple of the no way home things, but it also still felt fresh new, accelerating at times, mysterious at times.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm not the biggest you can't know fan of all time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've come around on things of his.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really, I really loved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was a big fan of that sweet when it came out because I thought that,
[SPEAKER_00]: It did a lot of what we've talked about the other themes, not doing again, I think intentionally.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was also reading Chikino saying that part of how he came up with that theme.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you saw this was he takes a kind of represent what he had lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: He pulled out certain notes, you know, what you can clearly hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that both makes it a little bit less playful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it, you know, it works thematically and it works honestly, but I, I thought it was kind of the ideal scenario that we have not gotten.
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe ever in an MCU film where we've had, well, we've certainly never had the same composer work on four movies within the same franchise, even the Avengers didn't have Sylvester and all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here, we finally get to see one full trilogy and then
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of me thought they were going to bring in a new composer for the fourth one and the same way they've brought in a new director.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think instead, Jikino gets to references prior stuff as much as he wants, which really adds weight to those flash pack scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then also treated as a whole new thing within the same structure, you know, so it's like you, all that stuff we didn't really naturally, because he's treating it as the foundation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I really thought it, I thought it worked really well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were a couple moments that reminded me, I mean, they almost seemed like not like he was actually playing the Elfman theme,
[SPEAKER_00]: score and and I thought that that was the first time we've gotten some of that energy which you and I have talked about wanting more of right all along.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in so many ways you could tell that they did the research they said they did and maybe that's bad to some people but they clearly went back and thought okay what do Spider-Man fans want and even like sneaking in some of that clear and obvious callouts to
[SPEAKER_01]: Andrew Garfields and Toby McGuire Spiderman and we talked about the video games.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lots of moves from the video games that that ground pound where he, yeah, yeah, you go up and then you shoot both webs of the ground and pull himself down to stop on something.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've not really seen that as distinctly before the web blossom, the web grenades from the first one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh-huh.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most while they're moves to obviously the the direct callouts to peer to and natural webs and he knew how to do it, but what and he was pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and then like, moving like a spiral like in your carpet.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyways, they clearly did their homework on what do people expect from these movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a perfect transition because as we sit right now, my from a friend is going to be that it's at 90% on rotten tomatoes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so for the file for us to rank
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that makes perfect sense to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: One, I think, you know, if it ends up at 87, let's say, that's a very good movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you got to remember that the culture has changed around all superhero movies from critics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, box office wise, this is, I don't know if you saw this.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're anticipating like 800 million opening weekend.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the only movie that ever made $1 billion on opening weekend ever, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think is Avengers Endgame.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Zilin movie to ever do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this movie is getting dangerously close.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's gonna be a really interesting, like I said earlier, I think there's gonna be a really interesting push-in poll a little bit from what Spider-Man fans want.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what MCU fans want is not always the same as what critics want.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, is Spider-Man homecoming a tighter movie than this, probably, honestly, like probably from a pacing and writing standpoint, probably.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and does no way home have some of the like spectacular ending of the three of them together, like some of the emotional resolution there that maybe this one even doesn't have.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like I could see some people saying homecoming's the best MCs by our man movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could see people saying no way home.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just think this has probably my favorite Spider-Man movie, because I also don't have the long running history even with Spider-Man too, which I acknowledge is a very good movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think is also a little bit, I don't mean this to be rude, heavily baked in nostalgia as well, like it is a very good movie, but people view it because it was like formative for them, they view it higher.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could make an argument, this is the best Spider-Man movie, and yet I can see why some of the varieties of the world are gonna give it like a four out of five, like an 80% because of maybe some of those things that like Spider-Man fans are looking for, yeah, they maybe feel like bogs the movie down.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for me, I think as of now I need to watch it again, we're gonna have a reflection episode, we're gonna talk to some creators, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is my favorite Spider-Man movie
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, while still acknowledging those things, I think I would probably say this is like a, this is a, this is a for sure top six to eight MCU film to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's in the very, very, very top tier and it's probably, you know, 95% in my mind, but I see how it's going to end at 87%.
[SPEAKER_01]: If that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, uh, I bet the audience score is 97%.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bet the audience score
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe only like the Candace's of the world kind of would see like, hey, I don't appreciate all the tie.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Candace really aligns more with variety than she does like your spider-man background.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, some of that maybe, but I can see that to me if you want a spider-man movie, the audience course got to be through the through the roof, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be curious to see how various folks respond.
[SPEAKER_00]: My thought, I mean, one, every one in our theater seemed to be having a really good time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like people were laughing at stuff and sharing and stuff, and everybody was in a good mood leaving.
[SPEAKER_00]: It reminded me of the Odyssey in that way, except I think this movie is a little lighter than the Odyssey.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think people were in fun here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could certainly, it's funny because some people would maybe compare this to something like contrast it with the Reeves Batman, right, where if you're talking about a movie that is a superhero movie that's kind of,
[SPEAKER_00]: redefining the genre some and it's, it's not way down by any continuity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people, I think, would do that as a huge pro of that movie, but at the same time, I think other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yep, that's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: would view that as kind of slow, you know, and, like, a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know there are fans of the DC universe that kind of wish they'd figure out just one Batman.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he does join the continuity, whereas some critics would say it's so refreshing that it doesn't have to do anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't mean it's right or wrong, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That is like that's what we score is weird.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the run to me, no score is 85, that doesn't mean it's worse than far from home.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just means that some people are viewing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're wanting something different.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's hard to, like that's where destined, you can't make a 100% because there's no way, well, and that everyone's gonna be pleased.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, one of the strange things about about the spider-man movies at this point is,
[SPEAKER_00]: For the longest time we talked about, it was kind of a troubled franchise, but really the first Spider-Man film was wildly successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second one was even more successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: The third one made a ton of money, but was obviously not something that people liked.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think the two Garfield films were like, like the first one was math for a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second one was viewed as bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: since then, like with the exception of those kind of three middle ones, you've had the spider verse movies, be universally acclaimed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've had the Tom Holland movies be universally acclaimed.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is shaping up to be the lowest score and we think it's maybe the best one.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, people forget that all three of the other ones are above 90%.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's kind of a hard thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a unique position for someone to be in as a filmmaker because
[SPEAKER_00]: you are up against a lot of other movies that people like a lot and sure you're having to build on those and you're having to do something different but you're all it's like people want things that are are not.
[SPEAKER_00]: really deliverable, like they want it to give them everything that they've already gotten, but also surprised them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I actually think that this movie kind of did that in a way that is pretty impressive.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, you know, I recently was watching back through some of the
[SPEAKER_00]: And my take away was like every week you mean, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, just like yesterday and the day before that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Robbie walks around just going like this whole day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, my take away there is just that you're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the style you've picked in.
[SPEAKER_00]: But man, Spider-Man 2 is really, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really good spider-man, the Spider-Man 3 shows exactly how good Spider-Man 2 is.
[SPEAKER_00]: with how much it falls off, I think Spider-Man 2 is always like I said earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be hard to ever be how kind of simple that story is.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not even fair really to compare though because because of the MCU.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's my point with like I don't, I don't need them to just try to redo that now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that was great for what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think that, yeah, I mean, that's the only movie for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is great for what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, that's the only one that I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: would still fly with with Brando Day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I think homecoming is one of the best MCU movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think all of the spider-and-movies have been great.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think no way home was special in a very unique way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that no way home feels like it's own animal to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it
[SPEAKER_00]: and there are some very poignant moments in it too for Tom Holland's character.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I don't, I think like I'm gonna have to watch it again and see, but I'm gonna go again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going, I remember watching Homecoming and hearing all the buzz about it and how much people loved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember walking out and being like, yeah, man, that was really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I didn't feel the same thing I felt like walking out of this movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: like homecoming and it's and walking out of no way home you were a little more hesitant you loved it but I was with you in person and and you were I remember in the upside to be like hey are you because there were things like that's what I meant starting this episode with this is the movie I kind of want to know a home to be I think know a home
[SPEAKER_00]: There are, we've talked about those.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are parts of that that feel a little indulgent, and then there are parts of that that are, like as good as the MCU ever gets, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think this is not bogged down by having Dr.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strange, magic in it, and it's not bogged down by multiversal villains or by
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to like kind of do all of that and do the high school humor thing, it's just a I do think it is the closest you can get to an MCU film doing what I thought spider mean to did so well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just couldn't believe Tom Holland was able to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the writers I just I didn't I didn't know that he was capable of kind of dialing up his age in this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: all the way down to, like I said before, the quips, his emotional facial acting, I just, I truly didn't know that, that sounds back because they were amazing, but I didn't know this is in daya and Tom Holland kind of had that in them, that I would ever feel as kind of emotionally connected to Tom Holland's Spider-Man as I do to like, Toby McGuire's Spider-Man, and he did it somehow.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, it is really impressive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, their chemistry here too was, uh, I think the rightly, you know, they're married, but the house that they're married, uh, they're actual partners.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I, um, well, here's the thing, guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope you enjoyed it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By the way, they're still in Avengers movie coming this year.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've heard vision quest is awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we'll be doing all kinds of weekly coverage of vision quest and I'm guessing we're getting another season of your friend the neighborhood Spider-Man at some point Yeah, we'll be fun to talk about in and Avengers stuff and so lots of stuff that we're gonna have going on here on friends from work And we just appreciate you being a part of the journey even just listening really helps us back in so thank you Please join us and we'll see you back here next time on friends from