A Test Audience Nearly Wrecked Spider-Man: Brand New Day

"We hated it. It totally didn't work."

That's Tom Holland describing a cut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day that, by his account, was assembled by doing exactly what a test audience asked for. In an interview with Quotable, Holland explained that he, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon watched multiple versions of the film during post-production, and one of them was rebuilt around every piece of feedback from the people who saw it at test screenings. The result was apparently unwatchable.

"We've seen loads of different cuts of this movie, and one of the cuts, they took all of the notes from all of the random people who saw the film. And then they changed the movie, and we watched it, and we hated it. It totally didn't work. It was what the people were asking for, but it wasn't quite what we wanted as the creatives. But they learned lessons from that experience, so a movie can change in a thousand different ways in the edit room."

Test screenings are standard practice in Hollywood. Studios show rough cuts to random audiences, collect feedback cards, and use the data to shape the final product. The problem is that a room full of strangers watching an unfinished film with placeholder effects and temp music aren't always the best judges of what a story needs. History is littered with examples of test audiences nearly derailing films. The original ending of I Am Legend was famously changed after audiences rejected it. Blade Runner's theatrical cut got a tacked-on voiceover and happy ending because test viewers found it confusing.

Brand New Day apparently came dangerously close to the same fate. Holland's phrasing is revealing: the studio didn't just cherry-pick a few notes. They took "all of the notes from all of the random people" and rebuilt the edit around them. I'm honestly surprised anyone greenlit that approach, because it's the exact opposite of how test feedback is supposed to work. You're meant to identify patterns and underlying issues, not treat a stack of comment cards like a to-do list.

The cut nobody wanted

What makes this story land harder is that the version audiences are actually getting seems to be working. Brand New Day currently sits at a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 7.1 average score, and it's tracking for the biggest opening weekend of 2026. That gap between "we hated it" and 91% on Rotten Tomatoes is the entire argument for why creative teams need the authority to push back on raw audience data. If Holland, Zendaya, and Batalon hadn't flagged the problem, there's a real chance the version in cinemas right now would be a different, worse film.

Brand New Day is the fourth MCU Spider-Man film starring Holland as Peter Parker, following Homecoming (2017), Far From Home (2019), and No Way Home (2021). Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, it opened in much of Europe, China, and Brazil on July 29, with US theatres getting it on July 31. The film also has a direct connection to the gaming world: Holland has spoken openly about how Insomniac Games' Marvel's Spider-Man 2 influenced the movie's fight choreography and finishing moves, something I covered in a separate piece earlier this week.

Cretton himself backed that up, saying stunt performers would screenshot moves from Spider-Man 2 and bring them into the writers' room. "They'd be like, 'Yeah, that's sick. Let's try to figure out how to do that for real,'" Cretton told IGN. It's a neat reversal of the old dynamic where games chased movies for legitimacy. Now a $200 million superhero film is pulling combat choreography from a PlayStation exclusive.

The test screening story also puts Holland's reputation in a different light. He's famous for accidentally spoiling things. During a surprise appearance at a theatre on opening night of Avengers: Infinity War, he walked on stage thinking the audience had already seen the film and announced "Don't worry everybody, I'm still alive!" to a room full of people who hadn't yet watched his character die. As Kotaku reported, video of the moment actually exists, and Holland's face when he realises what he's done is painful to watch. But when it came to protecting Brand New Day's creative integrity during post-production, he clearly knew when to speak up.

The film industry's relationship with test screenings has always been uneasy, and Holland's account is one of the most blunt descriptions I've heard from a lead actor about how badly the process can go wrong. Studios spend millions on these screenings, and the instinct to defer to the data is strong. It took the three leads of a billion-dollar franchise saying "this is broken" to course-correct. Brand New Day hits US theatres on July 31.