Spider-Man: Brand New Day is officially adding a genre that helped define Andrew Garfield’s Spidey era. The upcoming film is Tom Holland’s fourth solo turn as Peter Parker and his first in almost five years, with Destin Daniel Cretton directing an older, more isolated version of the hero. Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures premiere the movie in theaters on July 31, and Holland recently spelled out what kind of story fans are walking into.

Brand New Day is adding mystery to its genre lineup, with Holland now describing the film as a complete detective story. He says Peter spends a large chunk of the movie unsure of what he is chasing, which turns the web-slinger into an investigator rather than a hero who already knows his enemy. It is the same investigative direction used in Garfield's Amazing Spider-Man films, where Peter dug into secrets surrounding his father. Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies usually focus on spectacle and big team-ups, so this new genre is an exciting addition.

DC Studios' next DCU movie after Man of Tomorrow isn't what many expected (or were hoping for). One year after Superman sped its way into theaters with a "good, not great" box office performance, the second flick from James Gunn and Peter Safran's DCU, Supergirl, has arrived, and it's not delivering. After receiving mixed reactions from fans and critics alike, Supergirl brought in just $68 million worldwide in its opening weekend (under one-third of Superman's $220 million opening). DC Studios is only now in production on Man of Tomorrow and The Batman: Part 2 to release in 2027, but the next movie beyond that may have revealed itself.

According to a report from The Wrap, DC Studios is "prioritizing" its Deathstroke and Bane team-up movie, although no cast or director is lined up. Recently, Deadline claimed that Superbad and Peacemaker director Greg Mottola is a "front-runner" to lead the charge on Deathstroke and Bane's team-up. It was first reported in September 2024 that Captain America: Brave New World scribe Matthew Orton was cooking up a script starring the two villains/anti-heroes.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is reportedly set to add another legacy villain to its roster, one who would trouble Peter Parker right beside the already-confirmed Scorpion. Tom Holland’s next solo outing has one of the deepest villain benches in Spider-Man movie history. Michael Mando’s Mac Gargan, who first turned up in Spider-Man: Homecoming, leads the film's returning threats as the Scorpion. Now a fresh report points to a second familiar foe from Peter’s past, a sign his older enemies are circling again.

That foe is the Shocker, the vibration-powered criminal Spider-Man last tangled with in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Popular industry insider Daniel Richtman shared the claim on his Patreon, and it quickly made the rounds on other platforms. Should the report hold, Shocker would become the second Homecoming villain after Scorpion to resurface in the sequel, stacking another classic enemy onto a roster that keeps growing and feeding talk that a bigger threat could be bringing these criminals together.

Marvel Studios finally gave fans an official look at Marvin Jones III as Tombstone in an official piece of marketing for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, after keeping the actor essentially hidden in trailers, released movie clips, etc. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is going to include quite a few well-known Spider-Man villains. For instance, different pieces of marketing have revealed the webslinger will go up against Scorpion, the Hand, Boomerang, and Tarantula, to name a few. However, one villain named Tombstone (who has been featured in other on-screen projects) will play an important role as well, even though he hasn't been showcased in any released footage.

Nerdtropolis' Chris Gallardo recently shared a photo via X of a pop-up in New York City promoting Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and a couple of the images on the pop-up are of Marvin Jones III's Tombstone, giving fans an official first look at the actor in Brand New Day.

Tradition runs deep in the Avengers movie franchise, with each entry repeating a familiar set of iconic moves that MCU fans recognize on sight. Across four theatrical releases since 2012, the series has established a distinct identity that audiences associate with the brand more than almost any other corner of the MCU.

The first full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, which Marvel Studios screened exclusively for attendees at CinemaCon 2026 in April, brings several of those signatures back to the surface. The footage from the event points to several clear callbacks that connect Doomsday to traditions cemented in the previous four Avengers movies.

Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Brings Back Iconic Franchise Traditions 

Tobey Maguire, who portrayed Spider-Man in live-action in the early 2000s, has held a record for 19 years that will soon be broken by Tom Holland when Spider-Man: Brand New Day is released in theaters. Three major actors have played Spider-Man since Sam Raimi's first film was released in 2002. Many fans debate which actor played the character best, but Holland is about to do something that no other Spider-Man actor has done before.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is set to be released in theaters on July 31. Once the movie debuts, that means Holland will have portrayed Spider-Man and Peter Parker for nine years, as he first began portraying the character in 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming. Notably, Holland will surpass Tobey Maguire for the most years playing Spider-Man in live action in a leading role in a Spider-Man film.

Maguire previously held this record as he played Spider-Man and Peter Parker from 2002 until 2007, meaning he was the web slinger for five years. As mentioned, Holland first led a Spider-Man movie in 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming. He then went on to reprise the role in 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home and 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Marvel's newest TV show drops you into a rain-soaked New York, where a broken-down private eye who used to fight crime in a mask now drinks too much and lacks the motivation to be anyone's hero. Spider-Noir gives Nicolas Cage the lead, casting him as an aging gumshoe in the middle of the Great Depression, a man who once protected the city as a masked vigilante called The Spider. You can watch the whole thing in full color or in black and white. Either way, it looks and feels nothing like the polished Marvel TV that the MCU trained us to expect.

Then something clicked while I watched. The further I got into the season, the more I started to question how Marvel Studios runs the MCU. Spider-Noir works so well precisely by ignoring all of it. The show is free from the burden of connecting with other shows or movies and gets to be its own strange little world. This freedom is one of the many reasons it's such a great, unique series, different from anything the MCU has shown us. It made me wonder why almost every live-action Marvel project we get stays chained to one universe.

Spider-Noir comes from developer Oren Uziel and streams on Amazon Prime Video, with Spider-Verse architects Phil Lord and Christopher Miller among its producers. Those two helped shape where Cage first voiced this version of the wall-crawler in Into the Spider-Verse. The show leans hard into its pulp roots, and the period setting makes the already intriguing story even better.

Black Panther 3's first story details were teased ahead of the film's production and release. The MCU is slowly pushing toward developing new solo movies after this year's Avengers: Doomsday and next year's Avengers: Secret Wars. This will include returning to one of Marvel’s most successful solo stories, Black Panther, after a four-year gap in releases.

A report revealed new details about connections between Black Panther 3 and the Disney+ animated series Eyes of Wakanda. According to The Cosmic Circus, the movie will lean "heavily into the mystical aspect of Wakandan lore and mythology." Additionally, there are expected to be "a few connections to the lore from Eyes of Wakanda."

Marvel Studios previously indicated that Eyes of Wakanda was canon to the MCU, even though it is set thousands of years before the main MCU story begins. This animated anthology series follows the Hatut Zeraze (Wakanda's elite spies and War Dogs) as they travel through history on dangerous global missions. These warriors and spies are tasked with finding and retrieving lost, stolen, or dangerous vibranium artifacts that could expose the secrets Wakanda has kept over the centuries.

The Punisher: One Last Kill left unfinished business between Frank Castle and Ma Gnucci, and it may be one of the most exciting new feuds in the MCU. Castle faced a historic new villain in One Last Kill: Judith Light's Ma Gnucci, the first-ever major female foe for the character. Previously, The Punisher faced almost exclusively male villains in his two-season Netflix series, including Jigsaw, Agent Orange, Blacksmith, John Pilgrim, and the Schultzs.

Almost all of Frank Castle's Netflix foes had one thing in common: in classic Punisher fashion, they were all killed before the series concluded. The only true exception was the religious assassin John Pilgrim, whose life Frank spared, recognizing him as no longer a threat after he devoted his life to being a father.

Warning - This article contains spoilers for The Punisher: One Last Kill.

A new rumor about Spider-Man: Brand New Day may hint at Gwen Stacy's arrival in the MCU. Particularly after Hailee Steinfeld's animated portrayal of Gwen Stacy in the Spider-Verse franchise, the character's MCU debut has been a hot topic. While the first three movies have not shown any signs of her existing in this franchise yet, fans remain eager to see her thwip into action.

Insider Daniel Richtman shared a rumor teasing a supporting character in Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures' Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which hits theaters on July 31. Specifically, the character is "a blonde girl living in [Peter Parker's] building that's clearly into him," but he pays her no attention. Richtman compared the character to "that one Eastern European lady situation" from Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man trilogy.

The character referred to in the Maguire trilogy is Mageina Tovah's Ursula Ditkovich, who lived across the hall from Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). She was a kind girl who shared cake with Peter in the second movie and hung out a few times, and she is also the daughter of Peter's aggressive landlord, Elya Baskin's Mr. Ditkovich.

X-Men ’97 returns for its second season on July 1, and one exciting thing about it is that it improves on the show’s first season in one crucial way. The animated revival drew wide acclaim when it premiered in 2024, bringing the heroes of X-Men: The Animated Series back for stories that pushed well past simple nostalgia. Season 2 takes on more than its predecessor, scattering the team across different eras of history after the first season’s cliffhanger flung them through time. For all the praise that met the debut, one steady criticism followed it around, and the new season looks to have an answer.

The one major gripe fans had with the first season was pacing, but Season 2 handles that much better. The new season gives each timeline its own episode instead of cramming several stories into a single half hour. The opening three episodes, which arrive all at once on Disney+ on July 1, give the spotlight to one era at a time before the storylines come together. 

Daredevil: Born Again is building the foundation for another MCU team, one that will get its hands dirty in a way the Avengers never have. Season 2 of the Disney+ series introduced Mr. Charles, a CIA operative played by Matthew Lillard, who was in cahoots with Mayor Wilson Fisk and using him to smuggle weapons into America. But Charles also had his eyes on a bigger prize: superheroes.

When Jessica Jones arrived on the scene later in the season, she informed Matt Murdock that Charles had tried to recruit her and was doing his due diligence on numerous enhanced individuals. She couldn't suss out his goal, but his connections to Valentina Allegra de Fontaine put viewers ahead of the game.

The freshly dubbed New Avengers pulled a fast one on Val at the end of Thunderbolts*, using Project Sentry as a way to blackmail her into following their lead. Losing out on her enhanced pets left Val in between a rock and a hard place. Well, it appears that Charles is working to rescue her by putting together a new team, maybe even a live-action version of the Dark Avengers.

Sequels are still all the rage in Hollywood as the major studios work to build new franchises and rejuvenate old ones. 2026 alone has over a dozen different film sequels on the schedule, with everyone from Mario to the Mandalorian getting their time on the big screen, and that list only gets longer when looking ahead to 2027. 

Next year will herald the return of major IPs from Disney, Marvel Studios, and DC, not to mention more legacy sequels and successors to breakout box-office hits. 

All the Major Movie Sequels Releasing in 2027

A leak of a LEGO minifigure from an upcoming Avengers: Doomsday set recently surfaced, confirming one major character's official design in the film, and hinting that they will have a substantial role in a particular setting in the upcoming film. There is already a lot of hype surrounding Avengers: Doomsday, but as the movie's December 18, 2026 release date continues to get closer, fan excitement and anticipation will only grow. Marvel has tried to keep details about Doomsday out of the public eye, but like any title that is released in the modern era, leaks are seemingly inevitable.

Notable LEGO insider Brick Tap recently shared a post via X that included images of a torso from a minifigure that will be in an official LEGO set based on the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday movie. The images only show off the minifigure's torso section and hands, so the head and the legs are missing, but it is more than clear which character is being represented.

Due to the black and gray colors on the front of the minifigure and the golden horizontal stripes on one of the figure's arms, the leaked photos show what part of the minifigure of Bucky Barnes will look like in an Avengers: Doomsday set. Brick Tap confirmed that the minifigure was of Bucky in the text portion of the post, and notably, it confirms that Bucky's character design in Doomsday will be one fans are familiar with.

The MCU's Phase 6 will officially have a major time jump in one Disney+ series next year. The Phase 6 timeline has been complicated, to say the least, as it began in the '60s on Earth-828 before returning to Earth-616 to leap historically far into the past for Eyes of Wakanda. After that, the MCU's next crucial project was Disney+'s Wonder Man, which had events across 2026 and 2027's Hollywood, arriving just two months before Daredevil: Born Again depicted the fall of Vincent D'Onofrio's Mayor Wilson Fisk in October 2027.

Marvel Television boss Brad Winderbaum confirmed to ScreenRant that Daredevil: Born Again Season 3 will jump forward "a year or so" after Season 2. As last season concluded in October 2027, Season 3 will leap into Fall 2028 when it arrives next year as one of the final Disney+ shows in the MCU's Phase 6 slate:

"There will be a small time jump, but it's not too significant. It's not like we're jumping ahead five years or anything. We're probably jumping ahead a year or so, kind of like the real-life distance between seasons."

Marvel Studios delivered a full look at one of Spider-Man's most important characters, Uncle Ben. As Marvel fans know, Uncle Ben Parker is one of the seminal figures in Peter Parker's life, and his death is often the event that leads the young man to become New York's iconic web-slinger. Interestingly, this relationship has always been a bit of a mystery in the live-action MCU.

The official art book for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (titled The Art of Marvel Animation’s Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man) revealed this show's version of Uncle Ben Parker. Donning light brown hair, he is seen wearing a blue-and-white bowling shirt, with his first name on the upper left chest.

Avengers: Doomsday is sidelining Jean Grey in the fight against Doctor Doom for this one key reason. Marvel Studios' 2026 MCU crossover is set to feature a plethora of Fox's X-Men actors reprising their roles to team up with the Avengers and the Fantastic Four in the battle to save the Multiverse from incursions. Some of the returning legacy stars include Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, James Marsden as Cyclops, Kelsey Grammer as Beast, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, and Rebecca Romijn as Mystique. While this lineup is already a powerhouse, there is a key missing member that could completely turn the tide against Doom: Jean Grey. 

Speaking at her panel at Spacecon San Antonio 2026 (via Nerdtropolis), Fame Janssen, the actress who portrayed Jean Grey in Fox's X-Men movies, confirmed she has no involvement in Avengers: Doomsday, even admitting that Marvel Studios is making a mistake for not bringing her back in the crossover event: 

"I am so bad at keeping secrets that I always say to everyone I’m the worst actor in the world. It’s all on my face. You right away will read it. I think they made a mistake, but hey, who am I? I’m just a little me who thinks that."

Marvel Studios confirmed its own Days of Future Past remake is releasing in 2026, and the story it takes inspiration from goes back 45 years. Days of Future Past started as a two-issue comic in 1981 and grew into one of the most retold tales in X-Men history, a time-travel saga that gave fans a ruined future and a desperate push to change it. Fox already brought it to the big screen once, and the 1990s X-Men cartoon told its own version years before that. Now the animated revival that picked up where that cartoon left off plans to revisit the concept on its own terms.

X-Men ’97 returns for Season 2 on July 1, and the premiere episode wears its inspiration in plain sight. The first episode is titled Days of Past Future, a straight flip of the classic story’s name. Its official synopsis sets up the season’s central problem, with Forge and Bishop launching a plan to rescue the X-Men after the team gets scattered across time.

Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse will officially bring back 18 heroes and villains from Sony Pictures Animation's last two critically-acclaimed hits. Finally, with almost three years of waiting already behind fans, Beyond the Spider-Verse is just over a year from hitting theaters on June 18, 2027. Moviegoers are eagerly anticipating the final chapter of Miles Morales' trilogy tale that has united him with Spider-Men from across the Multiverse, including Hailee Steinfeld's Gwen Stacy, Jake Johnson's Peter B. Parker, Oscar Isaac's Spider-Man 2099, and more. 

With Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse already regarded among the best superhero blockbusters ever crafted, the trilogy-capping threequel has the potential to conclude the story as one of Marvel's greatest. Beyond has numerous loose threads to tie up, from Miles Morales' looming canon event (his father's death) to taking down the Multiverse-hopping villain, The Spot.

Currently, between announcements, interviews, and Spider-Verse 3's CinemaCon-exclusive first trailer, fans already know of 18 Marvel characters who will appear. Below is how those characters stack up against each other.

Avengers: Doomsday is still six months away from hitting theaters, but Marvel Studios is slowly building its marketing presence ahead of the December 18 release. The film's trailer has been one of the most sought-after pieces of footage in recent memory, though, aside from a limited in-person screening at CinemaCon 2026, fans have been left waiting. Now, a new piece of the puzzle has arrived: a slogan that fits the crossover event perfectly.

For the first time since its announcement, Avengers: Doomsday has a slogan, and it comes from two new BoxLunch-exclusive pieces of Doctor Doom merchandise that quietly went live on the retailer's website.

The first is the Marvel Dr. Doom Embroidered Patch Ball Cap, which features a patch of Doctor Doom pointing directly at the viewer alongside the phrase "Doom Is Supreme."