About 30 minutes before I hopped on a Zoom with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” director Destin Daniel Cretton, he had gotten word that the film had broken the all-time domestic opening weekend box office number, previously set by 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.” With $360 million, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” established a new record.
Not that you could tell.
Cretton, who made a splash with his sophomore feature “Short Term 12” (starring a pre-Marvel Brie Larson, Kaitlyn Dever and LaKeith Stanfield) before making mid-budget dramas like the Michael B. Jordan-led “Just Mercy” and finally graduating to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2021’s exemplary “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” looks unfazed, as loose and relaxed in a Levi’s T-shirt as anyone possibly could who is also responsible for the biggest movie on planet Earth.
It’s been a whirlwind few days — with the opening of “Brand New Day” coming the same day Disney canceled his Emmy-nominated streaming series, “Wonder Man.” That kind of whiplash would understandably leave any director battle hardened.
But not Cretton. He seemed positively buoyant. This is a conscious decision on his part.
“That right there was actually my biggest fear of getting into these types of movies because I thought, Oh, these movies have the potential to chew me up and spit me out. The anxiety could get so high that I might lose myself, and thank God that hasn’t happened. I do a lot of work to make sure that that doesn’t happen,” Cretton said.
What does he do? He surfs. He meditates. He spends time with his kids and with his friends, who are not a part of the industry. And he doesn’t put too much stock in the ups and downs of the business.
“I’m very careful at times like this, on both ends. I’m very careful at times of hype success. I’m also very careful at times of hype failure,” Cretton explained. “And I love the discourse, but talking to press, part of that can mess with my psychology a bit in a way that it can take me off the ball of why I love doing this and why I’ve loved doing it since I was a kid. Right now, I’m definitely trying to just keep my feet on the ground.”
The “Avengers” that never was
What makes the success of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” produced by Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures, even more phenomenal is that Cretton was never supposed to make the movie.
After “Shang-Chi,” Cretton signed up to direct “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,” which was meant to be the next big team-up movie for Marvel’s seemingly inexhaustible roster of heroes. Originally earmarked for May 2025, “The Kang Dynasty” would have featured a script by “Loki” creator Michael Waldron, and centered on Kang, played by Jonathan Majors, a villainous character introduced in the “Loki” Season 1 finale in 2021, before making his proper cinematic debut in 2023’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” A few months after “Ant-Man,” Majors was accused — and later found guilty — of two misdemeanor counts of assault and harassment. “The Kang Dynasty” was scrapped, with the next “Avengers” film reworked into “Avengers: Doomsday,” out this Christmas.
Cretton said he was offered what would become “Doomsday” but that he “couldn’t find my way into it.”
“When I told Kevin Feige I didn’t think I was the right fit for that, he mentioned ‘Spidey’ in the room, which was a huge relief to me because I thought he’d be like, OK, see you later,” Cretton admitted. He didn’t hear about the project for awhile and had started work on another screenplay when Feige reached back out.
A month or so later, Cretton found himself meeting with longtime “Spider-Man” producer Amy Pascal, who told him that they were working on a script. Again, he didn’t hear anything and continued to work on his own projects, until “five or six months later” Pascal called him back and told him, “We still don’t have a script but we really want you to do this movie.”
Cretton was born and raised in Haiku, Hawaii, on the island of Maui, and was homeschooled by his Christian mother, who didn’t allow him to read comic books. Still, the character of Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962, made an impression.
“Spider-Man was the character that, growing up on Maui, I was choosing to dress up like on Halloween. When I could watch the cartoons [they’d be ‘Spider-Man’], and so he was the only character that I was really connected to as a kid,” Cretton said. He loved the Tom Holland movies and was friends with Jon Watts, the director behind all of them. Cretton said that once he talked to the larger team — a group that included Holland, Zendaya and Sony chief Tom Rothman, along with Pascal and Feige — and “they told me the type of movie that they were chasing, I actually felt like that might be a good fit for me.”
While the pitch was “still a little vague at the time,” Cretton said, “they pitched it to me as we can’t go bigger so we have to go deeper.” They wanted to take the franchise “back to street level.” After a relatively low-key debut in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Holland’s Peter Parker was quickly being outfitted with next-generation gadgetry courtesy of Tony Stark and fighting aliens in outer space.
“We want to really concentrate the lens on Peter Parker and find a real character journey for him to take center stage and not have a Tony Stark and not have other characters taking away from his spotlight,” Cretton said, referencing the fact that in all of Holland’s Spider-Man movies he’s been saddled with a mentor figure who is also a legacy MCU character (Iron Man, Nick Fury and Doctor Strange all filled this role).
“Even though this movie does have many characters in it, the design of it was to make sure that every character that’s in this was a reflection of his journey and had a very clear reason to be there, because of Peter,” Cretton explained.
Yes, this even applies to the appearance of – spoiler alert – Jean Grey, one of the X-Men, who, as played by Sadie Sink, shows up as a mysterious foil for Parker.
It’d be fair to assume that this was dictated by the Marvel Studios powers-that-be; after all they are assembling a new crew of extraordinary youngsters to lead a new “X-Men” film, to be directed by “Thunderbolts*” filmmaker Jake Schreier. But Cretton said that he was the one who pushed for Jean Grey’s inclusion. (In previous big screen incarnations the character had been played by Famke Janssen and Sophie Turner.)
“It was not a mandate, it was a request,” Cretton said. “We asked.”
There were always plans to have a midpoint reveal as to who the real villain of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” would be and for a while it was a bit generic. The filmmaking team didn’t know who it would be, “but knew that it had to be somebody who could possess other people or take over their minds.” They also wanted it to be a character who was younger than Peter Parker.
“I was really chasing somebody who represented this feeling of escapism that young people I think are feeling. Initially we’re thinking of video games or being online and having avatars, a character who can be anybody in a city and really be literally connected to so many people in the city,” Cretton said. “But the reveal is that they are the most lonely person in the city, and having that be a young person felt like a really cool reveal, but also to me just felt like, Oh I understand what this movie is about with a character like that.”
The team asked Feige who they could use, a character that would “make sense in the world of Spider-Man.”
“I’m not personally trying to set up anything for Kevin. I just want the best story possible that makes sense for for Spidey, and Jean Gray was one of the options on the table. And then when we brought up Sadie Sink, I was just like, Oh, that feels perfect for this movie,” Cretton said.
Bringing in a new perspective
To hone the screenplay for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” written by franchise stalwarts Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, Cretton brought on Justin Kuritzkes, who had written “Queer” and “Challengers” (both for Luca Guadagnino). Cretton praised McKenna and Sommers’ work and they wrote alongside him for a spell, but eventually they left for the two new “Avengers” movies, which allowed for Kuritzkes to help out.
“When Justin came in, he brought fresh eyes and a new perspective, and he’s clearly got a different perspective with the way that he writes,” Cretton said. And although Kuritzkes didn’t get a screenplay credit (instead, he was credited with the cursory, catch-all “additional literary materials” distinction), Cretton stressed that “he was with me every day throughout the entire process to the end of the movie, and he wrote some of the most beautiful scenes in our movie.”
One scene – again, spoilers – involves a moment when Peter allows Jean Grey, a telepath who usually cannot access his thoughts, into his mind. They knew that they wanted the scene to involve Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and that “we wanted the love that he received from his aunt, to be able to share that with somebody else in this mind meld of sorts,” Cretton said. He talked with Kuritzkes about the scene, sharing what it felt like to be a parent and “what I would love for my kids to know about themselves and about their future and what they might become when they’re in their 20s.”
Kuritzkes went off and wrote the scene and delivered it to Cretton, who then read it to his wife in a coffee shop. “I couldn’t get through it. I was reading it to her out loud, but I just started thinking about my kids and I started bawling and my wife started bawling and we’re in a coffee shop with all these people,” Cretton said. “When I finished reading through it she said, ‘Can you frame that so we can put it up on our kids’ room?’ But to me that was the heart of the movie and that was all from Justin.”
Amidst the storm of press interviews, Cretton would also like to clear the air. He saw reports of Holland describing an early test screening of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” as downright ruinous. Cretton said that was not the case.
“You try things. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. The screening that he called a disaster still scored in the 90s and is actually not that different than the movie that’s out. But we were trying some things. We overcut it. I would run down that road but I don’t want to tell you something false,” Cretton said.
Every test screening, he noted, was an opportunity to try things, answering questions the audience wants answered and making a fun, propulsive movie. Sometimes, he said, you cut too much and it feels longer (there was a version of “Brand New Day” that was 15 minutes shorter and another that was 30 minutes longer). He said that the version in theaters is his preferred cut.
“We’re just trying to find the best version of the movie, and to me that is the living, breathing part of the movie. Sometimes you finish a screening and you’re just like, Damn, that sucked. But then the audience tells you something a little different, and something in your gut is just like, Oh, that did not feel good. That happens to me all the time,” Cretton said.
He would also like to clarify that Jackie Chan’s stunt team did not work on the movie. Chan did visit the set, but the stunts were handled by Peng Zhang, who studied under the late, great Brad Allen. Allen was a disciple of Chan’s and “Shang-Chi” was Allen’s last film. But the story circulating online that Chan’s team worked on “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is false.
Cretton refused to comment on the fact that people are discovering a photo of the Hulk’s weird alien son on Bruce Banner’s desk at the college where he teaches, an actual still from “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” (Since the end of the show, Hulk’s weird alien son has never been mentioned, even in passing, in the vast halls of the MCU.) “I’m glad people are finding it,” Cretton said, laughing.
Dangling threads
Cretton also wouldn’t elaborate on what the post-credits scene, which depicts a Spider-Man sighting on another planet, meant, exactly. He said they toyed around with several other endings but ultimately landed on the ambiguous option, unlike the MCU tendency to introduce a random character that we ultimately never see again (a club that includes Charlize Theron, Harry Styles and Brett Goldstein). He promised that viewers “will find out” what the little blip means at the end of the credits. “I do think it’s frustrating when these things are like left out in the open and you never see them. And ‘Shang-Chi’ is one of those. It’s still hanging out there,” said Cretton. “I have every intention of answering the question.”
The fact that “Shang-Chi,” which introduced one of the most charming new characters of the MCU (played by Simu Liu) and was one of the best, post-”Endgame” superhero movies, never had a sequel has befuddled fans since the film’s 2021 release.
“When you really look at what happened to the industry, at least from my perspective, it was just like everything went to s–t after that. I feel like if Marvel was where it was before, we would have had maybe two sequels already. Who knows?” Cretton said.
But just as puzzling was Marvel’s decision, on the same week that his movie was breaking box office records, to cancel “Wonder Man,” a show that is currently Emmy-nominated and which was renewed for a second season just a few months ago. What gives?
“I love that show to death. If it were up to me, we would be making that show. And I do believe that if – and I know this sounds weird – but if it were up to Kevin [Feige], we would be doing that show. And I’m just talking, I don’t fully understand the business of streaming, but if the business was right, we would be making that show because I know [Feige] loves that show as much as I do. It’s a bummer. I’m heartbroken about it. But I need to fully understand the why,” Cretton said.
Cretton described “Wonder Man” star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as “the f–king best” and “one of the most interesting characters in the MCU,” a super-powered actor who has to hide his abilities because of an on-set accident that left Josh Gad (actual Josh Gad) lost in an inescapable, “Backrooms”-style void. (Yes, the show was nuts in the best possible way.)
When asked if he would do a “Wonder Man” movie, Cretton said it was an “interesting question” but that yes, he would, partially because there’s a level of public transparency missing from streaming. “Because then we can clearly know if it’s a success or not. It’s just very clear numbers,” he said.
While Cretton doesn’t know what is next with his relationship with the MCU, he remains optimistic.
“I’ll say that I had an amazing experience. I loved working with Tom and Z and this entire cast. I actually had a pretty great time working with these two studios, with Rothman and Kevin and Amy. They’ve all become like family. Would I be open to doing another movie with this family? Definitely,” Cretton said.
Just as calm and relaxed as ever.
Maybe having the biggest hit of your career and a show that you loved working on canceled in the same week keeps you more even-keeled.
“It calms me down a bit,” Cretton admitted.
But hey, as long as he keeps swinging.
