Spider-Man: Brand New Day has an opportunity to explore the one storyline that The Amazing Spider-Man 3 missed

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is currently filming in Glasgow. The upcoming fourth movie, which shares its title with a 2008 comic, is expected to take place some time after the conclusion of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Meaning, Peter is navigating a world that has forgotten the existence of Peter Parker. Thus, based on this information, we can ascertain that Peter has no one to talk to this time.

Before he asks Doctor Strange to cast the memory erasure spell, Peter experiences the most devastating loss in his life: the death of Aunt May. His loss mirrors that of Andrew Garfield's Peter in 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, where Peter lost his girlfriend, Gwen. The follow-up to the 2014 movie, The Amazing Spider-Man 3, would've explored Peter's grief over Gwen's death.

However, as we know, Garfield's Spider-Man franchise was cancelled after the "underperformance" of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Sony made a deal with Marvel to include Spider-Man in the MCU in February 2015. Now, a decade later, the fourth movie in Tom Holland's franchise, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, has the chance to explore Peter's grief over Aunt May's death in No Way Home.

How can Spider-Man: Brand New Day explore Peter's sorrow and loneliness?

Rumors have suggested that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is darker and more "realistic" than 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home and 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home. No Way Home even hinted at the darker tone for the fourth movie, where Peter is forced to be his own man. This sounds similar to the plans for The Amazing Spider-Man 3, which would've followed The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Denis Leary, who played the role of Captain George Stacy in the Garfield movies, discussed the plans for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 in a 2015 IGN interview. The third movie in the Andrew Garfield Franchise would've seen a Peter who, out of grief, decides to use Dr. Curtis Connors' Lizard formula to resurrect George and Gwen. Here's what Leary said in that decade-old interview:

“There was this idea, at one point, that Spider-Man would be able to take this formula and regenerate the people in his life that died. So there was this discussion that Captain Stacy would come back even bigger in episode three.”

It should be noted that both The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ended with the death of someone from the Stacy family. The first one ended with George's death, while Harry Osborn's Green Goblin killed Gwen in the third act of the sequel.

Now, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has the opportunity to reuse this abandoned idea. Maybe, in the runtime of the movie, Peter encounters Mephisto, who entices the wall crawler to make a deal with the devil in exchange for bringing back Aunt May. This specific plot point has a lot of dramatic capacity as Peter is struggling for the first time in his life, as he doesn't have Tony Stark's support either.

But it should be noted that, as of now, we don't know if Mephisto is in Brand New Day or not. Kevin Feige teased the role of Spider-Man: Brand New Day in a July 20, 2025, press conference:

“I think there’s a promise at the end of No Way Home, that for as sad as it is that Peter is forgotten by everyone in his life, we are seeing for the first time in the Tom Holland Spider-Man stories him being a proper Spider-Man. Him being by himself, dedicated to saving the city, and dealing with — for lack of better terms — street-level crime, as opposed to world-ending events.”

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Do you think Spider-Man: Brand New Day will follow this abandoned The Amazing Spider-Man 3 plot? Find out by watching the movie on July 31, 2026.

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