In less than a week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has pulled in a cool $1 billion worldwide and snagged the biggest box office opening weekend in Hollywood history. That's right - the webslinger just made every other studio exec weep into their popcorn. The film is a shining reminder of why Sony will never, ever give up those Spider-Man rights, and why Marvel was smart to play nice with them. But while Brand New Day is undeniably excellent, it's not exactly a glowing sign that Marvel has figured out how to fix its own sprawling, tangled universe.

Let's be real: Brand New Day's box office success isn't exactly shocking. Sony and Marvel's recent Spider-Man flicks have been consistent money printers. Spider-Man: Homecoming and No Way Home both cleared $100 million in their opening weekends, and Far From Home took just six days to rake in $185 million. What's different here is the speed and scale - Brand New Day shattered records so fast it's practically a blur of web fluid and cash. It's proof that people still crave big-screen comic book spectacle when the stars align. But the magic that makes this Spider-Man work has been sorely missing from the non-Spidey parts of the MCU.

**Spoiler alert: we're about to dive into Brand New Day's plot, so if you haven't seen it, maybe go do that first.**

Jon Watts' Spider-Man trilogy eventually got tangled in the multiverse, but those films told relatively self-contained stories, building a grounded world around Tom Holland's Peter Parker. That approach highlighted his growth as a solo hero and made his Avengers crossovers fun. Now, director Destin Daniel Cretton and cowriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have struck a delicate balance between Sony's solo Spidey flicks and Marvel's crossover extravaganzas. We get classic rogues like John Bernthal's Punisher and Michael Mando's Scorpion, plus Mark Ruffalo's Hulk running around, but the heart of the story is Peter dealing with the emotional fallout of erasing himself from everyone's memory.

Ridiculous? Sure. But it works because previous Spider-Man films laid the groundwork. You could watch Watts' trilogy and walk into Brand New Day understanding the stakes and the characters' emotional baggage. The MCU's broader Multiverse Saga - which started with WandaVision and will wrap with Avengers: Secret Wars - has struggled to maintain that kind of narrative cohesion. Marvel's been spinning way too many plates, while Sony wisely hit the brakes on spinoffs. And given the lukewarm reactions to trailers for Marvel's next big thing, it seems fans aren't exactly hyped for what's coming.

Avengers: Doomsday will reunite Earth's Mightiest Heroes to face a Doctor Doom played by Robert Downey Jr. (Because why not? The multiverse explains everything.) The movie will likely use that same multiverse to hand-wave why Doom looks exactly like Iron Man, and it'll bring some live-action 20th Century Studios X-Men into the MCU. Marvel's clearly using Doomsday and Secret Wars to hit the reset button on the Multiverse Saga after years of franchise bloat. Downey Jr.'s return is also a way to move past the Kang-era, which Marvel abandoned after firing Jonathan Majors. Kevin Feige has teased that new X-Men iterations are key to Marvel's future. But if they want us to care about Charles Xavier and his students, they should take notes from Brand New Day.

Instead of introducing Sadie Sink's Jean Grey as a charming telepath, Brand New Day presents her as a desperate teenager willing to destroy anyone in her path to find her sister. The Grey siblings are mutants with dangerous powers, but what pushes Jean to lethal violence is the government hunting them to weaponize them. By framing Jean as a villain, the film keeps its story grounded and offers a glimpse into how the MCU might tackle classic X-Men lore. Jean doesn't want to hurt innocents, but she does - very publicly - and you can bet that'll fuel human-mutant tensions down the line.

Brand New Day manages to tap into all that without feeling like a stealth X-Men movie, which is impressive. Now that Spider-Man has given us a tasty preview of the MCU's new mutants, Marvel has a golden chance to keep audiences hooked - provided they don't drop the ball like Fox did.