It has been twenty-six years since the first X-men flick came out ushering in the Marvel age of movies. Since then there have been over 60 movies featuring characters from Marvel comic books. At this point I don’t know how one can go in cold to a new release like this week’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. A viewer needs the knowledge and education of a Talmudic scholar to keep track of all the characters and what is currently going on in their lives.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has no time or patience to catch rookies up to Spider-Man’s past cinematic adventures. There is no exposition to how this wall-crawler got his peculiar powers, nor a recap of what occurred in his last adventure on the silver screen five years earlier.  In one sense it is remarkable that the conglomerates behind Spidey’s adventures have so much faith in the memories of moviegoers, on the other it’s a little sad that conveying a story with an actual  beginning, middle, and end is of such little importance.

For decades that was the covenant filmmakers had with their audience. In exchange for purchasing a ticket, you’d get two hours of entertainment and a resolution. Marvel movies though tend to chock on an extra fifteen to thirty minutes, but at the expense of requiring you to see another movie in the coming months or years to find out how things will shake out for their colorful characters.

I’ve been through this before. In 1986 I got hooked on comics when Marvel had twenty-five years of publishing history. I was thrown right in the middle of a two and a half decade continuing story, and I was fascinated with what might happen next. To find out what happened previously I bought this strange oddity of a comic called Marvel Saga which was more text than picture explaining all the backstory minutia of the superheroes and their villains.

I suppose instead of Marvel Saga there are now TikTok videos and YouTube primers and Wikipedia entries available on everyone’s phone to fill in some gaps of what is going on in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But it would have paid off if they followed Stan Lee’s maxim that every comic is somebody’s first. Find a way to explain within the context of the movie what the hell is going on.

As someone who has seen nearly every Marvel movie and read a lot of the source material, Spider-Man: Brand New Day was a fun enough time at the theater. There were some exciting guest stars, a surprise villain and some great Spidey action. The major bummer is it felt more like a set-up for the next Marvel franchise, rather than a movie about Spider-Man.

Oh well, we can always count on the next one.