Tom Holland Reveals the Unexpected Batman Inspiration Behind SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY
It must be great being Spider-Man, right? Swinging through New York, saving the city, pulling off superhero moves and generally being the coolest guy in the room.
Except Peter Parker’s actual life can be pretty miserable, and Tom Holland found inspiration for that side of the character in a very unexpected place: The LEGO Batman Movie.
Holland revealed that the 2017 animated Batman comedy helped inspire Peter Parker’s lonely existence in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Not Batman’s gadgets, fighting style or intimidating superhero persona. It was Bruce Wayne sitting at home by himself that stuck with him.
"Something that I always really loved from a superhero movie is the LEGO Batman Movie when they talk about how he must be having parties with all of his friends and dating supermodels and all this sort of stuff and then it cuts to him like in his house alone," Holland told Accion Cine Series.
It’s one of the funniest and saddest jokes in The LEGO Batman Movie. Batman, voiced by Will Arnett, returns to Wayne Manor after another successful round of crimefighting. You might expect Bruce Wayne to spend the rest of the night enjoying the billionaire playboy lifestyle everyone assumes he has.
Instead, he’s alone with a microwaved lobster thermidor and Jerry Maguire. That contrast clicked with Holland because it fit where Peter Parker finds himself in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
His life as Spider-Man might look awesome from the outside, but Peter is isolated from his friends, grieving the family he has lost and dealing with criminals who want him dead while nobody knows who he really is.
Holland liked the LEGO Batman idea enough that he sent the scene to Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
"Sending that into [director Destin Daniel Cretton] being like this is a great little thing for us, we should do something like this," Holland said. "I just think that it creates a lot of layers and people are going to yearn for Peter Parker to make some life changes so that he can find happiness and peace and love."
It’s a smart piece of inspiration for Spider-Man because Peter Parker has always worked best when being a superhero comes at a personal cost. Saving New York is one thing. Going home afterward and realizing how much the mask has taken from your life is something else entirely.
Holland was also involved in shaping the film during the editing process, and he previously talked about one version of Brand New Day that he "hated." That cut had been influenced by feedback from test screenings, but giving audiences what they requested didn’t necessarily make the movie better.
"It totally didn’t work. And it's what the people were asking for, but it wasn't quite what we wanted as the creatives. But they learned lessons from that experience. So, a movie can change in a thousand different ways in the edit room."
Whatever changes were made along the way certainly didn’t hurt the movie commercially. Spider-Man: Brand New Day went on to become a monster at the box office, surpassing Star Wars: The Force Awakens to become the highest-grossing movie of all time domestically in the U.S.
The movie isn’t finished with theaters, either. A re-release is planned that will restore deleted scenes to the film, giving fans another reason to head back and see Holland’s Peter Parker on the big screen.