Hot damn Spider-Man: Brand New Day made me happy.

I’ve been a big fan of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. I don’t love them all equally, but I feel like they’ve held onto what really makes a Spider-Man story shine: heart.

These movies aren’t about massive alien invasions, or angry purple men, or any of that (to borrow a phrase from Brand New Day) “big potatoes” stuff. They’re all about small potatoes. When there are “big potato” events, these movies focus instead on the effect those big events have on smaller people in their everyday lives. They focus on how people wrestle with the consequences of those big things on a much smaller and more intimate scale. They’re about struggling to balance the responsibilities of being a hero with the responsibilities of being a regular person, and they’re about the costs of that struggle.

As it turns out…