A funny thing happens when you wait a few days to share some thoughts on a newly released movie; the box office results roll in. This probably shouldn’t effect one’s feelings on a piece of art/commerce, and when it comes to smaller, auteurist fare, it usually doesn’t. It’s the big ticket stuff where things get tricky, a seesaw between offerings like Disclosure Day (an aspiring blockbuster that immediately feels like an afterthought) and Backrooms (a modestly mounted fright flick that becomes a Hollywood turning point almost overnight). Those offering their thoughts on Spider-Man: Brand New Day before its release last weekend did so without cash register cha-chings ringing in their ears, but for anyone discussing it mere days after July 31st, ignoring the money would represent malpractice. That’s what happens when a flick beats the record for biggest opening weekend of all-time, raking in a mind-numbing $360 million across North America, adding another $582 million in overseas sales all the while. Investigating how, exactly, the fourth Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man became such a historic behemoth is just as interesting as the film itself, if not more so, even if the answers are ultimately elusive. So let’s do some digging.

We’ll start with pent-up anticipation, and what drives its fervor. The stew normally takes over a decade to settle, as evidenced by the four films that previously reigned supreme on the biggest North American opening weekends list: Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avengers: Infinity War, and Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Notice all the colons; the pair of Avengers flicks promised to tie together over 20 prior Marvel entries, released over the course of the previous decade, which is right around how long folks had been pining to return to the Star Wars universe. Even No Way Home, the closest of the bunch to a genuine stand-alone feature, was promoted as a celebration of 19 years worth of live action adventures with the web-slinger, a theme park style bonanza that apparently bequeathed plenty of meat on the bone to its immediate predecessor.

Its tear-streaked finale left Peter Parker (Holland) erased from the memory of both best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and paramour M.J. (Zendaya), and Brand New Day opens on a montage of the following four years spent in crime fighting solitude. Reuniting the trio is the movie’s primary plot engine, but comic book adaptations need more gas than that to get across the finish line. Here, that fuel is represented by a mysterious hivemind contagion, the search for its origin soon leading our hero to join forces with William Metzger (Tramell Tillman), head of a secretive government body named the Department of Damage Control. Head reeling from his newly elongated to-do list, Peter starts experiencing bodily changes that could only be described as superhero puberty, unwanted physical and mental alterations that he looks to control with the aid of science and a few pointers from fellow genius/demi-god Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). The erstwhile Hulk is hardly the only figure from Marvel lore to invade the proceedings, joined on the list by frenemy Frank Castle/Punisher (Jon Bernthal), villainous day player Scorpion (Michael Mando), and many, many more.

Unfurling about as smoothly as that synopsis reads, Brand New Day has never met a plate that it isn’t determined to spin. The last time a Spidey flick was this hellbent on piling it on was either Spider-Man 3, a blockbuster so chaotic and unwieldy that it spelled the end of the Tobey Maguire era, or The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which beget the same fate for star Andrew Garfield. Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’ screenplay is just as unruly, and while the execution is decidedly more fleet of foot this time around, the feeling of serving entirely too many masters remains unmoved. The resulting 145 minute runtime is somehow both bloated and truncated, exhausting for its innumerable subplot ambitions, yet unsatisfying in its inability to make all those moving parts sing in unison.

So was it a buzzy change behind the camera that led people to show up in droves? All three of the previous Holland vehicles were helmed amiably by Jon Watts, but the move to director Destin Daniel Cretton does come with a significant aesthetic upgrade. His only other Marvel Cinematic Universe credit, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, is often derided for devolving into a CGI slop fest in the last act, but the action featured in the preceding hour and a half is about as good as the studio has ever put forth. New Day matches it in both kineticism and creativity, characteristics that carry over into its pop-song-heavy presentation of the more interpersonal moments. You wouldn’t exactly call it tactile, but most of the candy-colored effects suit the wall-crawler’s kaleidoscopic world. They’d stick out like a sore thumb in a more dour outing, but Parker’s paradigm is forever red and blue over grey and black. The tackiness is a feature, not a bug, though slightly above-average melee isn’t known for putting butts in seats.

But parasocial relationships sure are, bringing us to the first of the three real inspirations behind this movie’s status as a phenomenon: Holland and Zendaya. Though the lovers may be star-crossed in the film’s fictitious New York City, their real-world counterparts tied the knot earlier this year, and their union parleys into some nice onscreen chemistry. Not of the sizzling kind, mind you; these movies are far too chaste for any real heat to come across, but they’re great scene partners, and New Day supercharges their moments together by making them relatively sparse. A pair of conversational sequences they share, one on a rooftop and another following an unintended discovery, are among the flick’s best, and for a younger generation that’s been weaned on three pictures’ worth of will-they-won’t-they, the two might as well be Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

Speaking of totems to Gen Z culture, Stranger Things alum Sadie Sink is also in attendance, inhabiting a role that’s been kept under wraps, and won’t be spoiled here. Those with virtually any literacy in comics canon will be able to guess it within their first three tries, but that obviously didn’t stop curiosity from driving up business. She’s fine in the part, though the quality of the performance is secondary to all the online sleuths who were evidently foaming at the mouth to be proven correct. Those same folks are certainly just as keen on discovering what her presence means for the future of the MCU writ large, a quest whose sisyphean nature has hardly ever been more glaring. Marvel’s endgame is to not have one, a delicious enticement for diehard fans and a ceaseless, cynical ouroboros for anyone foolishly hoping for a payout on their extended patronage of the franchise. This has been the case for years, but New Day is particularly brazen in its previews of coming attractions, nakedly reverse engineered to include more household names than necessary. The narrative works in their favor, and never the other way around.

Which is ironic, given that if Brand New Day’s colossal success proves anything, it’s that we’re all only really here for Spidey. He is to superheroes what Christopher Nolan is to directors, the last man standing after years of jostling for supremacy. Access behind his eyes as he soars through skyscrapers remains genuinely exhilarating, the fight choreography is still best in class, and his status as an eternal underdog is an evergreen empathy machine, and the color there is the operative word. There have been eleven of these things now, including three separate live-action sagas and an animated two-pack that’s set to become a trilogy in the near future, their fiscal accomplishments ranging from commendable to gobsmacking. If the numbers are to be believed, as they always should be in Hollywood, there’s still plenty more to come. This one is kind of a mixed bag, which should only appeal to… well, apparently everyone.