Tom Holland Reveals SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Fight Scenes Were Inspired by Insomniac's Spider-Man Games

When I walked out of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I thought Spider-Man looked faster, smoother, more nimble and even more creative in combat. Well, it turns out there's a good reason for it.

Tom Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton looked to one of the most beloved Spider-Man adaptations ever made for inspiration. Not another movie or comic, but Insomniac Games' PlayStation series.

The influence is easy to spot once you know it's there. Brand New Day lets Spidey unleash some seriously impressive combat, tossing ninjas and even Hulks around with the kind of flashy style that fans of the games will recognize immediately.

Holland was still playing those games while promoting the movie. Speaking with IGN at the film's premiere, Holland shared:

“I was actually playing the game last night. I couldn’t sleep last night; I was so excited about today. I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do, and I was like, ‘I’ll just throw the game on and have some fun.’”

For longtime fans of Insomniac's Spider-Man games, the connection goes beyond casual gaming sessions. Holland explained that the game's stylish combat directly shaped how his version of Spider-Man finishes fights in the film.

“For me, a lot of those finishing moves, a lot of our stuff was influenced by that stuff.”

That influence extended well beyond Holland himself. Cretton revealed the stunt team was packed with gamers who were constantly pulling ideas straight from the PlayStation titles and figuring out how to make those moves work in live action.

“A lot of the action designers and stunt people we had were huge gamers. They were able to experience things in those games that made them excited, and they would just screengrab the moves they really liked and bring them into the writers’ room and show it to me. And then we’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s sick. Let’s try to figure out how to do that for real.’”

It's actually a pretty cool creative process. Insomniac's games have spent years delivering some of the most fluid and inventive Spider-Man combat fans have ever experienced, so seeing those acrobatic finishers make the leap to live action was a natural evolution.

Instead of simply recreating comic book poses, the filmmakers looked at what already worked in an interactive format and adapted it for the big screen.

If you've been playing Marvel's Spider-Man 2, you can even jump into the action yourself. The Brand New Day suit has now been added to the game's growing collection of costumes, giving players the chance to recreate some of the same moves that inspired the movie.

With Spider-Man: Brand New Day swinging into theaters on July 31, fans now know one of the biggest secrets behind the movie's awesome action sequences.

Sometimes the best way to make Spider-Man look even cooler is to hand the controller to a room full of gamers and let them cook.