Spider-Man Composer Is Reinventing Spidey Theme in Brand New Day

As any comic book reader can tell you, the subtitle of the latest Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, comes from a 2008 Marvel Comics storyline. There Peter Parker genuinely undergoes a reinvention, a status quo shakeup after his longstanding marriage to Mary Jane had been erased, as well as all memory of his exposed secret identity vanished. In the MCU, the Spider-Man played by Tom Holland has gone through a similar ordeal, with all knowledge of Peter Parker removed from the entire populace. But will his brand new day be as drastic as that of his comic book predecessor?

According to composer Michael Giacchino, very much so, right down to music for Brand New Day being drastically changed from anything we’ve previously heard, thanks to the encouragement of director Destin Daniel Cretton.

“I suggested disassembling the main theme that we had leaned on for three different movies; just pulling sections out of it to just simplify it and reflect Peter missing his all his friends, family, and everyone around him,” Giacchino told Den of Geek while stopping by our studio at San Diego Comic-Con. “Any other person might have said, no, keep it as it is and just repeat what we did before. But Destin very much didn’t want to repeat what we did.”

Giacchino certainly knows the importance of music, especially in superhero movies. In addition to creating fantastic scores for the J. J. Abrams-produced Star Trek movies and Pixar films such as The Incredibles and Inside Out, Giacchino wrote the music for superhero movies as wide-ranging as Thor: Love and Thunder and The Batman. This in addition to stepping into the director’s chair to helm the Marvel Special Presentation Werewolf By Night, one of the best entries in Phase Four.

That said, it’s easy to see why some might want to stick with the Spider-Man theme established in Homecoming. Spider-Man’s main theme repurposes the song from the 1960s animated series, removing the jauntiness from the jingle and changing it into something sweeping and epic. The change helps retain the fun feeling of those first movies, which portrayed Peter as a teenage kid thrown into a world of great responsibility, without losing the sense of superheroic scale. The score helped us believe that Peter Parker would get nervous about asking a girl to the prom while Spider-Man would have to hold a collapsing ferry together without a second thought.

Yet as Tom Holland told us in this month’s Den of Geek magazine cover story (get your copy here!): “One of the reasons we took a big break between No Way Home and Brand New Day was to allow the characters to grow up off-screen.” With Brand New Day moving Peter into a new phase in his life, Giacchino wondered if perhaps it was time for him to leave the franchise and let Spidey move on.

“I thought at the beginning of this thing, what am I gonna do? I was a little worried,” Giacchino admits. “Should I be doing a fourth one? Do I have anything new to say?”

Eventually, Giacchino found that he did, but only with the help of his director. “Destin was great at saying I should go for it if I wanted to try something,” says Giacchino. “For me, the excitement comes from working with people who allow you to not repeat yourself, or encourage you to go in different directions. That’s not always the case. People want what worked and they want you to do it over and over and over, and over again. I tend to be the kind of person that wants to break what we did before and try and do something different. I’m very happy when that can happen, and it did happen with Spider-Man.”

What does this broken, reworked version of the music sound like? We’ll have to wait another week, and then we can hear what it sounds like when Tom Holland’s Spider-Man swings into his Brand New Day.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases in theaters July 30, 2026. Also keep an eye on Den of Geek for more of our coverage of SDCC, including our fuller conversation with Giacchino and director Brad Bird about their new animated noir epic, Ray Gunn!