Spider-Man: Brand New Day Script Notes Reveal a Half-Step Fix to the MCU’s Peter Parker

When he entered the MCU, Peter Parker was the Queens kid we knew from the comics and movies… for about 30 seconds. He strides through his crowded apartment building, proudly holding a DVD player he found on the street, just like standard-issue Peter Parker would do. But then, he finds Tony Stark sitting on his couch, and from Captain America: Civil War onward, the MCU Spider-Man diverted from the standard depiction. The MCU Spider-Man is a scion of Tony Stark, a kid who has access to incredible tech and nano-suits, who never once needs to take a crappy freelance gig from J. Jonah Jameson.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day promises to bring Peter back to first principles, as Tony’s death in Avengers: Endgame and the great memory reset in Spider-Man: No Way Home mean that he’s on his own. Most of the script notes that Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton shared with EW seem to confirm that, especially the bit that says, “No more Stark money for gadgets.” That’s a sigh of relief for those of us who love Spider-Man because he’s an everyman. And yet, those hopes get dashed just a few seconds later, when we read script pages about Peter’s AI and his Fabricator, inventions that suggest more resources than Peter should have.

Cretton’s annotations describe the Fabricator as “something that could be made by a kid genius with limited funds,” echoing a note about his AI (named E.V.) that reads, “All of his tech needs to be made by Peter.”

As these notes underscore, Peter has lost his billionaire benefactor and now must do it all on his own. But he still has access to an AI and a suit-making machine, just like he did under Tony? What’s the difference?

To be sure, Peter’s genius status and ability to create gadgets have always been a problem for the character. As early as his first appearance in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter was a working-class teenager in Queens who just so happened to make incredibly strong, dissolving webbing—and a machine to shoot those webs—in his bedroom. Over the years, he’s added other high-tech pieces of equipment to his arsenal, including spider-trackers and a weird spotlight thing that projects his face.

Pointing that Peter would be rich if he only sold his patents is as old and banal as saying that Bruce Wayne would do more good than Batman if he donated his millions to mental health programs. We just have to suspend our disbelief and accept that Peter is a super-genius, and is also so broke that he has to work for a skinflint J.J.J. because that’s how we get the classic Spidey stories we love so much.

But the MCU Peter Parker doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. Marvel has so wedged him out of his original blue-collar milieu and so thoroughly replaced dear Uncle Ben, laid off and on his ass in the 2002 movie, with billionaire arms dealer Tony Stark that Spider-Man still seems to exist in Iron Man’s shadow. So even if E.V. looks like the cobbled tech from ’80s flicks E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Explorers, it still feels like Peter’s paying homage to Tony Stark. Why does he need a Fabricating machine? Why does he need an AI?

Obviously, we haven’t seen the movie yet, and these questions may be given reasonable answers. But this far into the MCU, with its billionaires and rich people, one can’t help but wonder if Marvel has forgotten the working-class roots that made Spider-Man such a unique hero.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31, 2026.