Spider-Man 2 fikk filmens drakt, og filmen fikk spillets avsluttere

Spider-Man: Brand New Day premieres on 31 July, and the week leading up to it has traffic running both directions between the film and the PlayStation games. Insomniac shipped a free update to Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on 28 July that dropped in Peter's movie outfit, the Fresh Start suit, alongside the one he wears in Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. The new suit was announced on Insomniac's social channels shortly after Sony Pictures put out the film's trailer, timed so players would have it in the wardrobe before the premiere.

The more interesting half of the exchange went the other way. Tom Holland told IGN that a lot of the action in Brand New Day, and specifically a lot of the finishing moves, came out of Insomniac's games. In the games those finishers trigger off a timed press of triangle and circle together, and the people building the film's fights were players who knew exactly which ones they wanted.

"they would just screengrab the moves they really liked"

— Tom Holland

Those screengrabs went into the writers' room, Holland said, where the group worked out how to stage them with a human body. He also admitted he could not sleep the night before a press day and put the game on to settle himself, which is a small thing but a funny one: the actor who plays Spider-Man calming his nerves about a Spider-Man film by playing a Spider-Man game.

Applying the update puts both in the inventory the next time the game loads. Peter's collection now runs to 47 against Miles's 45, since Miles appears in neither Marvel Tokon nor the new film, and the Fresh Start name comes from the MCU version of Peter having to rebuild from nothing after the spell at the end of No Way Home wiped him from everyone's memory.

The update landed in an already busy week, with the Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls beta running at the same time. The reception split. The Tokon suit landed fine. The movie suit did not. Within a day, fans were saying the Fresh Start suit reads orange in game rather than the dark red it has on screen, which is the exact complaint that followed Insomniac's original Advanced Suit from the 2018 game, loud enough back then that the studio adjusted the colour grading for the sequel. The criticism went past the palette too, with players noting that the promotional render matched the film while the shipped version looks closer to a variant of the Classic Suit, that the textures do not match, and that the battle damage seen in the movie is missing, which has some calling the collaboration rushed. Insomniac has been here before and fixed it before, since both the Raimi and Amazing suits were reworked after similar pushback. Anyone who cannot stand looking at it in the meantime can wear the Tokon version instead. The colour grading argument is not mine to fight, and I would rather talk about the part of these games that a film crew found worth stealing.

That part is the movement. Large parts of Brand New Day were inspired by Insomniac's games, director Destin Daniel Cretton told Polygon, and he was specific about which parts.

"There are things that those games do so well that are incredibly inspiring"

— Destin Daniel Cretton

Cretton says he is not a big gamer but played them and studied them with his team during production, pointing at the web swinging, the action and Peter Parker's personality as the elements that carried over. He also stressed the film pulls from the comics and the earlier movies as well, rather than adapting any single version. I have put more hours into swinging across Insomniac's Manhattan than into finishing its missions, so a stunt team screengrabbing finishers and taking them to a writers' room reads to me as the traversal finally becoming the thing worth exporting.

The film is not the only place borrowing. PUBG Mobile x Spider-Man: Brand New Day went live on 30 July and runs to 14 September, putting Web-Shooters back into Classic Mode so players can swing between buildings and slow enemies with web attacks. Wall climbing is new, and it combines with Double Jump for extra mobility. A Web Grenade traps and slows opponents, while a Spidey-Sense ability warns players when nearby enemies move, shoot or drive. Themed locations went onto the map, among them Skyline Plaza, Peter Parker's Apartment, a Train Rescue Sequence, a Rescue Photo Zone and a Cemetery Tribute Zone, alongside Lucky Spins, timed missions and login rewards. It is the second Spider-Man crossover PUBG Mobile has run after the No Way Home tie-in back in 2022.

The commercial reasoning behind all of it is not hidden. Brand New Day is projected to take around $800 million in its opening weekend. Nobody ships a movie tie-in game anymore, because forcing that kind of synergy is more trouble than it pays, so a free suit drop is what replaces it. A cosmetic costs a fraction of a licensed game, pulls lapsed players back into a title that is nearly three years old, and gives PS5 owners walking out of a cinema a reason to buy a copy. A free suit is the cheapest thing that will make me reinstall an old game, and it works on me every time.

Insomniac's own runway is the next question. Marvel's Wolverine arrives 15 September as a PS5 exclusive, without an open world and with a more brutal combat system, and the studio has confirmed Spider-Man will not turn up in it at all, not even as a cameo. Bolivar Trask is the main villain, a name Spider-Man players may recognise from Ultimate Spider-Man in 2005. Beyond that, reports point to Marvel's Venom targeting 2027 as a Miles Morales-style spin-off, and a Marvel's Spider-Man 3 that would close Peter's trilogy, floated for 2028 or 2029 and possibly landing next to a PlayStation 6.

Anyone catching up before Friday has more than Insomniac to work through. Our Best Spider-Man Games to Play Before Spider-Man: Brand New Day material runs through Ultimate Spider-Man, Web of Shadows, Shattered Dimensions, Edge of Time and the Spider-Man 3 tie-in, several of which handled the multiverse and the Venom rivalry long before either became standard. Brand New Day itself opens with Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, Tramell Tillman, Michael Mando as Scorpion, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner and Sadie Sink in a role Sony has not confirmed.

So the movie suit in the game looks wrong and will probably get patched, and the game's finishers are in the movie and cannot be patched at all. For a series that spent two decades getting adapted into rushed tie-in games, having a blockbuster crew screengrab your combat animations is a strange kind of promotion.