Tom Holland Ripped Spider-Man 2 Finishers for Brand New Day

Stunt coordinators screengrabbing a PlayStation game and walking those screenshots into a writers' room to plan a $200-million-plus blockbuster's fight scenes. That's where we are now with the game-to-movie pipeline, and I think it's one of the most interesting things happening in either industry.

Tom Holland confirmed on the red carpet at Spider-Man: Brand New Day's July 27 premiere that Insomniac Games' Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was a direct reference point for the film's combat choreography. Speaking to IGN, Holland didn't frame it as vague inspiration. He was specific:

"A lot of the action, a lot of the finishing moves were inspired by it. I was actually playing the game last night. I couldn't sleep last night, I was so excited about today. I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do, and I was like, 'I'll just throw the game on and have some fun.' For me, a lot of those finishing moves, a lot of our stuff was influenced by that stuff."

Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton backed this up in a separate interview with Polygon, explaining that the influence ran deeper than Holland's personal fandom. According to Cretton, the action designers and stunt performers on set were avid gamers who actively mined Spider-Man 2 for choreography ideas:

"They would just screengrab the moves they really liked and bring them into the writers' room and show it to me. And then we'd be like, 'Yeah, that's sick. Let's try to figure out how to do that for real.'"

Fans have already started cataloguing the parallels. A widely shared post on X from @Digital_Crave broke down scenes from the Brand New Day trailer side-by-side with Spider-Man 2 gameplay, pointing out a backflip off a building that looks nearly frame-for-frame identical to an animation in Insomniac's game.

From Tie-In to Source Material

The direction of influence here has completely flipped. For decades, the relationship between superhero films and games ran one way: a movie would come out, and a studio would rush a mediocre tie-in game onto shelves to catch the marketing wave. Now a game studio's combat designers are setting the template that a Hollywood stunt team reverse-engineers into live action. I can't overstate how much that shift says about where Insomniac's work sits in the broader Spider-Man canon. When your finishing moves are good enough that professional fight choreographers are screenshotting them as reference material, you've moved past "adaptation" and into "definitive version."

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 launched in October 2023 as a PS5 exclusive and has sold more than sixteen million copies as of last November, according to Sony. Its commercial performance was somewhat complicated by a leak revealing the game cost over $300 million to produce, roughly three times the budget of its predecessor. But the creative impact has clearly outlasted the budget discourse. Insomniac even released a new patch for Spider-Man 2 timed to Brand New Day's theatrical debut, adding Peter Parker's new movie suit to the game, as reported by Push Square. So the exchange goes both ways now.

Brand New Day itself is performing well so far, sitting at a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 7.1 average critic score, and it's tracking for the biggest opening weekend of 2026 when it hits US theaters on July 31. Holland's fourth outing as Peter Parker has maintained the relatively consistent quality the MCU Spider-Man films have held since Homecoming in 2017.

Insomniac, meanwhile, is gearing up to launch Marvel's Wolverine, another third-person action game set in the same universe as Spider-Man 2. If Brand New Day proves that Hollywood is now actively pulling from Insomniac's playbook, I'd expect Wolverine's combat to get the same treatment whenever that character's next film appearance rolls around. The studio has gone from making great Spider-Man games to, in a very real sense, defining how Spider-Man moves on screen. I don't think they could have asked for a better endorsement.