Tom Holland Says He Has Promoted Films He Knew Were Bad. Brand New Day Is Not One Of Them

Tom Holland has spent release week doing the thing every lead actor does — sitting in front of microphones and explaining why you should buy a ticket — and on the Dish podcast he stopped to describe how that job actually feels from the inside. Promoting a film you believe in, he said, is easy. Promoting one you do not is a different exercise entirely. The Tom Holland Brand New Day press tour, he made clear, is firmly the first kind.

"When you're doing press for movies you're really proud of, it's really easy," Holland said in remarks reported by The Hollywood Reporter. "Because when they ask you questions about why should people go and watch this movie, you're not lying to anyone. You really feel like people should go see it."

That is a pleasant enough sentiment on its own. It is the sentence that follows which got the clip shared: "I've had experiences before when people say, like, 'Why should you see this movie?' And in the back of your mind, you're like, 'You shouldn't, because it's shit.'" Holland did not say which film. He did not say which films. He named nothing at all, and that restraint turns out to be the most interesting part of the story.

What Holland Actually Said On The Dish

The context matters. Holland is at the end of a long promotional run covering two projects at once, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day opening in the US on 31 July 2026, internationally from 29 July, and the Los Angeles premiere behind him on 27 July. Destin Daniel Cretton directed, from a script by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers and Justin Kuritzkes, and the shoot ran from August to December 2025 across Glasgow, Pinewood, Surrey, London and Basingstoke.

Asked how the run had gone, Holland gave the line that has been quoted everywhere since.

It's felt really like a bit of a victory lap, to be honest. I've really enjoyed it. I'm super proud of both of the films.

Read that last word again. Both. The victory lap remark is not about Brand New Day alone — it covers The Odyssey as well, which is the other film Holland has been out promoting. Plenty of write-ups have quietly clipped the sentence down to a Spider-Man endorsement. It is one, but it is a shared one, and the difference is the sort of thing that decides whether a quote is reporting or decoration.

He Named No Films, And That Is The Story

The obvious next move for a site like this one is to produce a shortlist. Holland has years of credits behind him, a fair number of them in franchises, and it would take about ninety seconds to assemble a plausible-looking rundown of candidates with a question mark on the end. We are not going to do that, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.

Here is the complete inventory of what Holland disclosed:

• That there has been more than one occasion where he was asked to sell a film he privately did not rate.
• That in those moments the honest answer would have been that you should not go and see it.
• That Brand New Day and The Odyssey are not in that category.
• That the current run has felt like a victory lap and he has enjoyed it.

And here is what he did not disclose: a title, a studio, a year, a genre, a co-star, a director, or any hint of how many films he was talking about. He did not say whether they were Marvel films or anything else. He did not say whether he had told anyone at the time. Every one of those blanks is a blank because he chose to leave it blank.

Why A Small Remark Travelled So Far

Nothing Holland said is news in the strict sense. Everyone who has ever watched a junket already assumed that some percentage of on-camera enthusiasm is professional. The clip moved because a working member of the machine confirmed the mechanism out loud, in the middle of using it. The Tom Holland Brand New Day press run simply happened to be the venue.

That is the genuinely candid part. A film's marketing run requires its cast to be delighted on demand, several dozen times a day, in front of a rotating cast of interviewers asking the same four questions. The system does not have a setting for "I have seen it and it is fine." Holland's remark acknowledges that the setting is missing, which is more honest than the standard answer and considerably more useful than another round of superlatives.

It also cuts the other way, and this is where a lot of the coverage has got sloppy. If an actor telling you a film is good can sometimes be a performance, then an actor telling you this particular film is good is not evidence of anything much. The quotable bit is the admission that they sometimes lie. It is not proof that this time he is not.

Enthusiasm Is Not Evidence: What The Reviews Say

Fortunately there is a body of opinion with no stake in ticket sales. The Tom Holland Brand New Day reviews were filed before he said any of this, and they are strong. Brand New Day opened at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes from 43 counted reviews at embargo lift — a tie with No Way Home, and above Homecoming's 92% and Far From Home's 91%. Two caveats, both of which matter. A 93% from 43 critics is a much softer number than a 93% from four hundred, and it will move as the count grows. And Metacritic, which weights rather than tallies, opened around 70, which is materially cooler than the Rotten Tomatoes headline suggests.

The praise

The strong reactions were very strong, and they clustered around the same two things: Holland's performance and the film's emotional register. Our full round-up of the opening-night reactions has more, but the flavour is here:

• Mike Ryan, Uproxx: "Tom Holland's best performance as Peter Parker and the best Spider-Man movie since Raimi's SPIDER-MAN 2".
• Drew Taylor, TheWrap: "so joyful and emotional, investigating/celebrating/deconstructing both the character and his power".
• Brandon Lewis, GVN: the emotional beats are "among the MCU's best", and it is "easily Tom Holland's most varied, confident MCU work".
• Brian Davids: the "most emotional, most mature and most atmospheric installment in the franchise".
• Variety's round-up headline: Holland has "never been better" in a sequel that ditches "multiverse tedium" for a "grounded Spider-Man tale".

The dissent

The negative reactions are fewer, but they are not vague, and they are not the kind you can wave away as contrarianism. Three separate critics independently reached for a version of the same word — overstuffed.

• James Preston Poole, Discussing Film: an "overstuffed script that puts MCU interconnectivity and cameos over its title character".
• Kaitlyn Booth, Bleeding Cool: it "feels like a stepping stone rather than a cohesive standalone film".
• Erik Anderson, AwardsWatch: "super dodgy CGI and really uninspired fight sequences".
• Carlos Alonso Morales, IGN: the "stakes feel fairly low".
• The Holofiles: "overstuffed with far too many elements", with a "painfully flat climax".

Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture added a structural complaint worth noting: the film "doesn't fully pick up until Sadie Sink's character announces herself" — a character whose role Marvel still has not officially announced days from release. Strong, then, but not unanimous. That is a perfectly good place for a film to be, and it is a more informative place than a press quote can take you.

What The Tom Holland Brand New Day Quote Actually Supports

Because the interview is short and the coverage has been loose, it is worth separating the claims that survive contact with the transcript from the ones that do not.

The one row that keeps getting mangled is the second. If you see the victory lap quote presented as a Spider-Man-only endorsement, the outlet has trimmed a sentence to fit a headline.

The Numbers The Victory Lap Is Riding On

Holland's mood is at least partly a function of tracking, and the tracking is good — although the two published forecasts disagree by roughly the gross domestic product of a small film festival. Deadline has the film headed for a $180M-plus domestic opening, which would be the best of the year to date. Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast is considerably bolder at $230M–$250M.

Boxoffice Pro's reasoning is that "pre-sales started off strong and tracking has been ticking upwards", helped by an end-of-July slot with what it calls that "one last blockbuster before the summer's over" sauce. Deadline's more conservative figure and Boxoffice Pro's aggressive one are both live, and anyone quoting one without the other is picking a side.

One correction to a framing you will read a lot this week. If you see Brand New Day billed as Marvel's biggest success since No Way Home, that claim has to get past Deadpool & Wolverine, which opened at $211.4M and finished at $636.7M domestic in 2024. Most versions of the framing quietly skip it. It should not be skipped.

Why Marvel Needs The Enthusiasm To Be Real

The context for all of this is a studio that had a difficult 2025 and knows it. Captain America: Brave New World took $413.6M worldwide on a $180M budget with a 47% Rotten Tomatoes score. Thunderbolts* managed 88% — the best-reviewed film of Phase 5 — and still lost money on the same budget. The Fantastic Four: First Steps was the year's biggest at $519.1M worldwide against $200M. Not one Marvel title made 2025's global top ten, a fact we went through in detail in our look at the 2025 box office correction.

Which is the uncomfortable lesson sitting underneath Holland's remark. Thunderbolts* proves that good reviews and a proud cast are not a business model. Brand New Day arrives with better numbers than either on both counts, and it still has to convert them, in a year where Avengers: Doomsday lands in December and the franchise's next act depends on this one landing first.

Kevin Feige has framed the film's premise as the payoff to No Way Home's ending: "we are seeing for the first time in the Tom Holland Spider-Man stories him being a proper Spider-Man", a Peter "dedicated to saving the city, and dealing with — for lack of better terms — street-level crime, as opposed to world-ending events". That is the pitch, and it is why Jon Bernthal's Punisher and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk are in the cast list at all. Whether it works is what the film itself has to answer from Friday.

The Bottom Line

What Holland gave the Dish is not a review, and it should not be read as one. It is a rare on-the-record acknowledgement that the machine he is currently operating occasionally requires him to say things he does not mean — offered, with some nerve, while he is operating it.

The reason the quote landed is not that he vouched for the Tom Holland Brand New Day campaign. It is that he confirmed something audiences have suspected for as long as junkets have existed, and then declined to hand anyone a scalp to go with it. The film opens on Friday 31 July. The critics have already filed and the box office lands over the weekend, and neither of those depends on how enthusiastic anybody sounded on a podcast.