One of Spider-Man’s Best Writers Perfectly Explains Why Brand New Day Beats Superhero Fatigue

You can always tell when a film is really good: it generates excited discussion, especially from some of the greatest writers. J. Michael Straczynski is one of the best in the business, creator of Babylon Five, and he’s also one of the best Spider-Man writers of all time. In the wake of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, he’s been excitedly discussing what makes this film so good – and how it subverts storytelling conventions in the superhero genre.

Straczynski has taken to his Substack, discussing one particular question: whether Brand New Day has a “MacGuffin” – an object, person, or event driving the entire plot. As Straczynski notes, a MacGuffin (which he shortens to an “MG” for brevity) is “just one tool in a writer’s toolbox for purposes of structure.” The problem, though, is that the superhero genre – and the MCU in particular – has focused a little too much on MacGuffins, which naturally create a structure revolving around them. Examples include:

• The Infinity Stones in the Infinity Saga – in films as wide-ranging as Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: The Dark World, The Avengers, and Avengers: Endgame.
• The Red Room vials in Black Widow.
• The Emergence in Eternals.
• The Eye of Sin in Shazam!
• The Scarab in Blue Beetle

“A MG movie is about the characters chasing after a given item for their own purposes, or to ensure that someone else, the putative bad guy, doesn’t get hold of it,” Straczynski notes. “Rather than being first and foremost about the characters, putting them in first position, a MG story is about the characters as a subset of a search for the stone, the orb, the tesseract, the godkiller sword, the spear of destiny, the aether, the mother box, the trident, the Golden Apple, the gauntlet…the list goes on and on.”

J. Michael Straczynski Believes This Is Why Brand New Day Works So Well

Straczynski argues the problem with superhero films right now is simple; we’ve overused the same plot and structure. It’s not that audiences have become tired of superhero films, but rather that they’ve become tired of the exact same plot. “The worst thing any film, in any genre, can do is to fail to surprise the audience, by virtue of showing them something they’ve already seen many times in various forms,” he says. “After a while, they dial out.” That, he argues, is what’s happening with the superhero genre itself.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is something very different. It’s a character story, which is a very different kind of storytelling. “A character story, on the other hand, can start in a thousand different ways and resolve itself in just as many,” Straczynski says. “The audience’s emotions are engaged, they’re trying to get ahead of the story but they can’t because it stays one step ahead of them, and in the end, the solution is character based, not based on what happens to an external, inanimate object.”

I think Straczynski is undoubtedly right about this. And yet, for all that’s the case, Brand New Day does draw on some very different tropes and narrative structures – ones audiences are perhaps less familiar with. As I noted in Brand New Day‘s ending explainer, part of the film’s genius lies in the fact it deploys Maureen Murdock’s “heroine’s journey” rather than the Campbellian hero’s journey. The theme of connection lends itself naturally to this, because the heroine’s journey is traditionally about the need to reconnect to community. Everything in Brand New Day – every single character arc – services this narrative structure.

Many viewers are comparing Brand New Day to Thunderbolts*, and with good reason; another film about connectivity, this too follows the model of a heroine’s journey. The comparison offers a warning to Marvel, though, not to repeat the mistake of the Infinity Saga; not to over-use the same narrative tropes, further weakening the genre as a whole. People are excited about Brand New Day because it is a different kind of story, but there is a risk of overusing it. “A character story, on the other hand, can start in a thousand different ways and resolve itself in just as many,” Straczynski writes. So Marvel need to take advantage of that.

For now, though, we can sit back and enjoy the ride. The MCU has given us something fresh and new, moving away from the MacGuffin plots and the traditional hero’s journey, and Brand New Day‘s box office alone shows how much people have been hungering for it when it comes to this genre. Superhero fatigue isn’t a thing, but rather audiences are just tired of the same old story. Brand New Day shows the way forward, not by simply repeating its format and structure, not by replacing the hero’s journey with the heroine’s, but by daring to do thngs that are fresh and new.