'Brand New Day' and the Specter of Spidey Copaganda

This post contains spoilers for the plots of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the Insomniac Marvel's Spider-Man game series.

In 2018 when Insomniac's first Spider-Man game came out, a lot was said about its approach to Peter's relationship with the police. In Marvel's Spider-Man, Peter's closest thing to a best friend in the story is Yuri Watanabe, a captain in the NYPD that Peter has a running "Spider-Cop" bit with, and the bulk of its approach to an open-world New York City filled with side activities on a map for Peter to engage with is narratively framed through Peter being allowed to hack into a series of police surveillance towers across the city while repairing them on Yuri's behalf.

It felt awkward at the time, and rightly so. Spider-Man's relationship with the police in the comics had always been up and down—on a scale of tolerance more so than on whether or not he actively worked with the NYPD as much as he did in Marvel's Spider-Man. But the game released as public debates over police brutality and the surveillance state were becoming more and more mainstream, just two years before they would explode on a national level with the killing of George Floyd sparking mass protests and critical debates about America's relationship with its police forces.

A Spider-Man that would so gleefully and brazenly accept being an arm of a high-tech surveillance net because it made him feel like an honorary police officer instead of a superhero of the people harshly clashed with the keen understanding of the character the rest of Insomniac's game displayed with care. For the most part, Insomniac seemed to listen to the critique. Over the course of the first game's DLC stories, Yuri and Peter's relationship becomes more fraught, with her ultimately leaving the police to become a masked vigilante. By the time the studio was developing a Miles Morales-led spinoff for the series, it openly acknowledged that introducing an Afro-Latino protagonist meant a dramatic change in the game's relationship with the police was necessary. By Marvel's Spider-Man 2 in 2023—and debate about police overreach now a thoroughly mainstream topic—the game's activity map was handled by an independent, public forum app developed by Miles' best friend Ganke that sources alerts from citizens rather than the police.

It's bizarre then, as those conversations have only continued to develop—especially police forces' partnerships with surveillance companies like Palantir and Flock—that Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a movie that unabashedly wears its inspiration from the Insomniac series on its spandex sleeve, falls into the exact same pitfalls those games did, in a world that is far more critically minded of such an approach.