Spider-Man: Brand New Day is finally on Premium Video on Demand platforms, and fans are already spotting some production mishaps. The most glaring error comes from a scene involving Sadie Sink's Jean Grey, and it has sparked plenty of chatter online. Brand New Day received its digital release on October 6, two months after the movie hit theaters on July 31. It is now available to purchase and rent on platforms like Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
The visual effects error in Spider-Man: Brand New Day comes from the sequence where Tom Holland's Spider-Man races across New York while Jean Grey body-hops through civilians to taunt him, with Spidey accidentally crashing a wedding along the way. It's the same wedding from the trailers that fans initially believed featured John Jameson, J. Jonah Jameson's son, as the groom. In the course of this heated pursuit, Spidey asks his homemade AI, EV, to analyze Jean Grey's jump range. The camera then cuts to the heads-up display in his lenses as EV analyzes the same street Jean just body-hopped across.
The glaring issue in this shot is that the HUD display, crowded with data readouts and a blue tint, is missing background details present in the original image. In the regular street shot, which is the audience's point of view, the New York streets stretch out as a long, busy avenue lined with buildings and vehicles.
In Spider-Man's HUD screen, however, the vehicles and buildings beyond the red van are gone. Instead of a wider Manhattan cityscape, you see the actual edge of the production set.
This happened because the film was not actually shot in New York but on a studio backlot standing in for the city. A studio backlot is the outdoor section of a studio lot containing street sets built to mimic city blocks, in this case Manhattan. Because backlots are only so long, background environments like the one in the regular Brand New Day shot are digitally extended and populated by the VFX team.
The team simply forgot to composite that digital extension into the Spider-Man HUD shot as well, which is why the edge of the backlot is visible, a mistake eagle-eyed fans noticed.
How Does an Error Like This Happen on a Production as Big as Spider-Man: Brand New Day?
Visual effects mishaps like this happen in massive blockbuster movies all the time. Star Wars fans will recall the famous "Jeans Guy" from The Mandalorian, when a crew member in a T-shirt and casual jeans was spotted in the background of an intense action scene. The gaffe, from the Carl Weathers-directed Chapter 12, became such a sensation that Disney+ digitally erased him within days, much like HBO did with the infamous Game of Thrones coffee cup.
Studios spend millions on big-budget productions, so how do they not catch errors like this? The explanation is quite simple. Visual effects are the most grueling aspect of a big-budget film like Brand New Day. A production on this scale involves an enormous number of VFX shots; its predecessor, Spider-Man: No Way Home, had roughly 2,500, spread across 12 studios and 3,000 artists.
What studios like Sony typically do is split and outsource the work to multiple visual effects companies. In Brand New Day's case, Industrial Light & Magic, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, RISE, Cantina Creative, Soho VFX, and SDFX were among the vendors involved. Each company handles a different aspect of the movie's visual effects, so it's easy for certain details to slip through.
For example, say one vendor handled the live-action plates of Spidey chasing Jean Grey and built the seamless digital New York extension for them. If a second team was tasked with the HUD overlay, focused on tracking data and interface graphics, the first team's background file could easily be left out by accident.
The shot then moves into the next phase of post-production, where an error like this should ideally be caught, but it goes unnoticed because VFX teams on movies like this work under extremely tight deadlines. On Marvel films, rendering can still be underway just days before the theatrical premiere. When thousands of shots are being finalized simultaneously by multiple overworked teams under extreme pressure, slips like this are bound to happen.
Geraldo Amartey is a writer at The Direct. He joined the team in 2025, bringing with him four years of experience covering entertainment news, pop culture, and fan-favorite franchises for sites like YEN, Briefly and Tuko.
