An advanced screening of the "brand-d-d new" Spider-Man movie

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a movie my younger son has been anticipating for months. Six months, he said, though it's probably longer than that. At age 12, he's not yet all that polished on estimating times.

You see, Spider-Man is officially his favorite superhero. He also loves the Flash, and last year's Halloween costume was the Flash's archenemy, Reverse Flash. But now that he's made it through the Flash TV series and is not interested in the 2023 film starring Ezra Miller, having been indoctrinated by the negative memes on the internet (I actually quite like that movie), Tom Holland's Spider-Man has claimed the largest percentage of his heart. 

In fact, he likes Holland and Zendaya so much that we considered whether maybe he would like The Odyssey, and since my wife and my older son missed their chance to see The Odyssey last night, that may still be on tap.

They chose Wednesday as Odyssey day, before ultimately missing out because there were only tickets remaining in the front row, because my younger son and I were attending an advanced screening of Brand New Day at the Hoyts Melbourne Central. I'd be working in the city, so he'd need to take the train in to meet me. And he was all set to do that by himself until he learned that the train ride was 30+ minutes and he thought he would get bored. So my wife accompanied him, which she'd always wanted to do anyway, before returning back home.

I jumped on these tickets as soon as I saw my email for the advanced screening through ReelGood. I know events like this tend to sell out quickly, and it so happened that I checked my email just at the right time to get them, knowing it would make my son delirious.

I've talked in the past about an advanced screening doesn't mean much to a kid, at least you wouldn't think. Playground bragging rights are likely not what they used to be, and seeing a movie for free is irrelevant for a kid because their parents pay for their tickets anyway. And really, this was only 24 hours before everyone else could see it -- less than that if they went straight after school. 

But with a Spider-Man movie, the appeal was more clear than for something like GOAT, which was the last advanced screening he and I attended at Melbourne Central. He was giddy for the Brand New Day advanced screening, and we made sure to get there plenty early to take in all of the festivities. 

In fact, it was almost not early enough. We got to Melbourne Central around 5:25 and weren't supposed to start queueing up until 5:45 for a 6:30 start, so I took my time eating two slices of pizza in the food court downstairs. He didn't opt for anything to eat, knowing there would be free popcorn and wanting to save his appetite for that. 

But when we did go up around 5:50, there was a huge line to get in. This is not something he usually experiences, so he likened it to the David Byrne concert we went to earlier this year, his only such previous memory. The line to check our QR codes was not so long that there was any danger of missing the start of the movie, but I did have enough time to panic slightly about the quality of the seats we would get. It turned out those fears were unwarranted, as they'd allocated two adjacent auditoriums, the fanciest two they had (more on that later), and there were plenty of optimal seats when we got in wearing our special Spider-Man wristbands and plopped down our jackets to claim our seats. (Remember, it's winter here.)

The lobby had most of the usual jazz you would expect. A number of Spider-Man displays where you could take photos, including a classic red carpet, though it does not appear there were any actually Hollywood dignitaries in attendance. Plus some classic comic book covers framed lovingly. In fact, the whole Melbourne Central was decked out in Spider-Man fanfare. Here are some pics:

There were other good pictures I took that capture the scene, but unfortunately, all of them have either my son or me in them, and you know I try to avoid posting photos that violate my family's privacy. 

The Takis? There was one on each seat. I was more charmed by this at the start of the movie than when I saw product placements for Takis about four times during the movie. 

We posed for photos on the red carpet and in front of another display, our wrists set in the classic Spider-Man web-slinging pose. It was good fun. 

In any case, we were excited enough by the lobby stuff that I forgot a crucial movie ingredient for my son: the lollies. When he worried about the size of the free popcorn, I told him we could probably get a second one on our return from the bathroom, which worked out just fine. He already had one drink, which was enough in that regard. 

But he didn't mention a bag of lollies, which we would always get in a situation like this because we wouldn't normally be getting free stuff, and sometime the free stuff would include something sweet, either lollies or an ice cream. It was only during the middle of the movie that I realized we'd forgotten about this, and it actually caused me about five minutes of anxiety as I worried my son would be having a somehow less perfect experience as a result. I even offered to run go get him some, but he told me in no uncertain terms that I should not do that. 

In any case, I really liked the movie, and here is a link to my review, just posted.

Oh, I have to explain the subject of this post. 

You may recall from this post that the radio ads for our streaming service Stan include a try-hard broadcasting school grad who insists on pronouncing the D in the phrase "brand new." Most normal people say it the way Jason Hervey says it in Back to the Future -- if you know you know -- which is "bran new." It flows off the tongue more easily and everyone understands what you are saying, even though you have excised one of the letters.

But no, the true broadcasting school style would be to include the D, so the announcer says, as I've written it and as my family jokes about it, "brand-d-d new." Just try saying it with a D. You'll hear it and you'll notice how ridiculous it sounds.

Well, apparently the woman who introduced the movie to us had also had this broadcasting school education, because she also announced it as "Spider-Man: Brand-d-d New Day." My son and I looked at each other and laughed.

And here are some other related thoughts (no spoilers):

Apex in Apex

No, in this case, the Charlize Theron vehicle on Netflix from earlier this year is not actually involved, though I did think it would be funny if you saw the movie Apex in the Apex screen format.

I mentioned earlier that this was one of Hoyts' fanciest two screens, both of them relatively new, carved out of an existing space. (If you knew the layout of Melbourne Central, you'd know there is no space for new building.) The other screen is one I talked about in my post about seeing The Odyssey on opening day, the "LieMAX" theater that passes itself off as a true IMAX screen. 

This one? It's called Apex, though it was not immediately clear to me what that meant. 

Well, here's an explanation for you from the internet:

HOYTS APEX is a premium cinema format featuring super-sized curved LED screens, high brightness, and Dolby Atmos sound. It replaces traditional projectors with direct-view LED technology for a sharper and more immersive picture. [1, 2, 3]

And here's a picture that shows what it looks like:

As you might guess from me having written a post about "LieMAX," I'm somewhat skeptical of this theater's tendency to be honest with me about the experience it's providing, and specifically, its justification for charging more for that experience. (Under ordinary circumstances. Obviously I wasn't being charged anything here.) But I have to say, I did find the curvature of the screen to be cool in the way I found the original curved TVs appealing, and the picture did look quite good.

Ret-conning May Parker's death date

This is as close to a spoiler as we'll get here -- well, maybe one other -- but it's a spoiler for Spider-Man: No Way Home, not for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And, well, I guess it's too late to warn you now that I've included the spoiler in the sub-heading.

Anyway, you've seen No Way Home so you know that Marisa Tomei's Aunt May buys it in that movie. R.I.P. Marisa. You are still as beautiful as you were in My Cousin Vinny.

That movie came out in 2021, so by the general logic that these movies take place in our present tense, that would have been the year Aunt May died. Yet there are several pointed shots of Aunt May's gravestone in this movie that list the year of her death as 2024. 

This is confusing to say the least. 

My first thought was that they were trying to establish a sense of the recency of the event. They want it to have occurred more recently in the story than five years ago, so they are ret-conning it so it was only two years ago, if we take the present day to be 2026.

But I just looked it up, and the present tense of the MCU is supposed to be 2027 -- a little confusing as that is only one year (or really, five months) away. Wouldn't it be easier just to make it align exactly with the release date of the movie?

But let's say it is 2027. That makes her death three years ago. Fine. 

But in the movie, we're supposed to believe that at least four years have passed since she died. Because in this movie, we see (very mild spoiler, don't worry about it) the entire college careers of MJ and Ned pass at MIT. Last time I checked, an undergraduate college career is four years. Meaning that either the death should have been 2023, or the present tense should be 2028. 

It's confusing enough that the easiest solution would have been just to deemphasize the death year. You can shoot a gravestone in such a way that you can see the name but the years of the lifespan are out of the shot. Instead, the camera focuses on it so much that you'd almost think it was an intentional instance of getting us to think about the years. 

One thing I will say is that the birth year is listed as 1964, so that means May was 60, or about to turn 60, when she died. Tomei is only just now 61, so in 2021, when May's death was actually shot (it was really probably 2020), Tomei would have been only 56, because her birthday is in December. The rare case of aging an actor up rather than down. 

A traveling troupe of 2026 collaborators

I thought about making this last one its own post, but might as well just squeeze it in here and totally abuse today's word count, not to mention your patience as you read. It'll save me from having to do two consecutive Spider-Man: Brand New Day posts, in any case. 

The other spoiler that I think is not actually a spoiler is that the Punisher is in this movie. Everyone already knows that, right? At least I think they do. He's played by Jon Bernthal, and interestingly, I don't think he is ever once called the Punisher. In fact, he's only ever called Frank. His last name, Castle, never even makes it in.

Bernthal has something in common with Holland and Zendaya, which is that all three of them appear in The Odyssey.

That got me thinking about the weird coincidence of how many actors appear in the same movies as each other in 2026. If it is just a coincidence. Who knows, there are so many of them that maybe they formally aligned their schedules so they could all be available for the same projects.

We wouldn't necessarily be surprised if that were the case for Holland and Zendaya. They are married, after all. But how about these others?

1) Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are in three of the same movies in 2026: The Drama, The Odyssey and Dune: Part 3. I don't think I'd be worried just yet if I were Holland, but it might raise an eyebrow.

2) Florence Pugh and Zendaya are together in two movies, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune: Part 3. Oops, is it a spoiler that Pugh is in Brand New Day? Maybe I should stop telling you I'm avoiding spoilers while continuing to include spoilers. 

3) Anne Hathaway is in everything. But I'm not really sure that fits the exercise.

I thought I had more. I guess it's good I didn't make a separate post of it.

Okay you can go now. 

Spider-Man and his many verses, and other No Way Home thoughts

We finally contributed to the massive -- and still growing in leaps and bounds -- box office of Spider-Man: No Way Home over the weekend. 

The viewing prompted many different thoughts -- you know, the type I'd write about in separate posts if I wanted to have a week's worth of Spider-Man posts. Since I don't, I'll fit them all here, making use of subheadings. 

And of course, there will be SPOILERS. 

The first was one that had occurred to me previously, but one I've never written about:

Why is Spider-Man the hero who is always trifling with the multiverse?

It's a shame Spider-Man: No Way Home is so many times more successful than the already successful Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is getting a sequel in 2022. I wouldn't say it's a remake of that movie, though it does deal with multiple versions of Spider-Man from different universes coming together to fight a threat to the very space-time continuum. At the very least, it owes something to it.

Into the Spider-Verse is an adaptation of a 2014-2015 comic book series conceived and written by Dan Slott. So he was the one who may have taken Spidey down this path to begin with. 

As an MCU movie, I think No Way Home does its best not to be directly indebted to any particular source, since these plot turns are supposed to take even comic book nerds by surprise. However, I'm reading that the basic story arc comes from a 2007 comic story arc called "One More Day," and Wikipedia credits Slott's Spider-Verse story with inspiration for the film.

Because I don't have a huge breadth to my comic book knowledge, I cannot say this for certain, but I have to figure that other superheroes have had multiverse type storylines, if only because they have been around so long that the writers need to get creative (or ridiculous, take your pick). But Spider-Man is the only one whose multiverse dalliances have received the cinematic treatment -- twice now.

Why is that? I'll leave that one dangling as we get to our other topics for today ...

Covering our eyes for different reasons

I noticed while buying tickets that Spider-Man was rated M, meaning it is appropriate for children over 15. My younger son is eight, and only just turned eight last week. That's not even close.

But we were already at the cinema, and if I mentioned it to my wife, it could only derail a day I had carefully planned through two viewings of the previous two MCU Spider-Man movies -- presumably also rated M. So I just bought the tickets and moved on.

So it was with some surprise that my wife groaned over the intensity of the trailers before the movie, which included The Batman and Morbius. (She was less shocked by The 355, maybe just because it stars women?)

And so while I was closing my eyes to avoid seeing footage I didn't want to see, part of my ongoing prevention of having all the images from a movie spoiled by familiarity, my eight-year-old was closing his eyes to avoid traumatizing images -- and my wife was providing an additional layer of protection by using her hand as a second shield.

I can't tell you how traumatizing those images actually were, since I didn't watch them. I suspect it was just the tone, since the 15-year-olds who were officially approved to watch these movies wouldn't want something that my eight-year-old would be perfectly comfortable with. I'm sure my 11-year-old was plenty awed and excited in an aspirational way. I suspect more than anything, the eight-year-old had that sense you get when you've shown up in the wrong place and are suddenly subjected to something that wasn't intended for you.

Then again, superhero movies are sort of intended for everybody, and it was clear from the trailers that we are not winding down on them anytime soon. Speaking of which ...

A reminder of when I didn't see every superhero movie

You'd figure someone like me would be perfectly prepared for the fan service in No Way Home, perhaps even its ideal target. You'd be wrong.

As I was watching the film and piecing together who was who by process of elimination, I was reminded that I did not go to the theater to see three consecutive Spider-Man movies ... and still to this day have not seen them.

It's a weird sequence of events considering that I really liked Spider-Man 2, the second Sam Raimi movie, the one with Doc Oc as the villain. I guess I heard bad things about Spider-Man 3, though, because I never bothered with it.

Then I recall finding it absurd that they were rebooting the character so quickly, which means I didn't see either of the films starring Andrew Garfield. 

By the first Tom Holland movie, every superhero was being rebooted constantly, and I'd also adjusted my perspective such that I felt like I had to see every significant film released in a given year before I closed my rankings each January. Perhaps especially superhero movies, even if they didn't have a realistic shot at my #1 for the year. (Though Wonder Woman was actually my #2 in 2017, the year of the first Holland movie.)

In hindsight, it seems really weird that I just blew these movies off, especially given the character's prominence within the pantheon of superheroes. (I once had a theory that Spider-Man was one of the most famous five superheroes of all time, joining Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk.)

But it wasn't totally uncommon either. I didn't see either of the Iron Man sequels in the year of their release, and that character is, nowadays, the most prominent challenger for that top five. 

I suppose it's not completely unprecedented even today. I'll be wrapping up my rankings next week without seeing the latest Venom movie. There was one Friday night when I was going to see it, but I couldn't find a parking space at the mall (it was Black Friday) so I just bailed and never got back to it.

Having missed three of the existing seven Spider-Man movies -- or eight if you count Into the Spider-Verse -- was not ultimately a problem. I knew Jamie Foxx was the villain in the second Garfield movie. I didn't remember who was the villain in the first Garfield movie -- a lizard? -- but by then it was obvious because I knew Thomas Haden Church's Sandman was the villain in the final Tobey Maguire movie. When the lizard finally transforms back into Rhys Ifans at the end, I remembered Ifans' announced casting in that movie.

I do think it would now be worth going back and seeing what I missed, and I can watch it in a manner that gives appropriate nods to the multiverse. Having watched the two Holland movies with my kids leading up to the viewing, maybe I will boomerang back outward and watch the Garfrield movies in reverse order before getting to Spider-Man 3. Hey, why not. 

Which leads me to ...

The surprise ongoing effectiveness of Tobey Maguire

Tobey Maguire has become an absolute pariah in Hollywood. Everyone thinks he's an asshole -- we all know the stories of his behavior as a poker player, as documented in that Aaron Sorkin movie -- and he really hasn't been working at all.

Since Garfield was the first one to appear here, I wondered if maybe Maguire wouldn't even be in the movie. After all, they could have but didn't include James Franco in the cast.

When he did show up, I was surprised at a) how youthful he still seems at age 46, and b) how he's still able, more or less, to do the thing that ingratiated us to him in the first place.

Most actors who see a dimming of their fame -- say, Orlando Bloom -- seem awkward when we see them again. Like all the sudden they just can't do what they used to do anymore. Whereas once they were charming, now they aren't. Now their awareness of their own downfall actually diminishes their craft, and they just can't pull it off anymore. 

That wasn't the case for Maguire. He's actually sort of the heart and soul of this movie in a weird way. He factors into a key moment in the climax when he gets Holland's Peter Parker to control his rage and resist doing something he would have regretted. 

I'll be curious to see where he goes from here. Is this the comeback role Maguire needed?

Or will he fritter it away and still act like an asshole to everybody?

Dr. Strange's carelessness with magic

After all he'd been through with Thanos, I never really believed Dr. Strange would conjure a spell to "brainwash the entire world" -- to use his own words -- on a whim.

So while we might blame Peter Parker for the space-time endangering events of this movie, that's like saying you blame the child for asking to play with a gun, rather than the adult who gave him the gun to play with.

I guess Strange didn't see any of the other Spider-Man movies, because he's unfamiliar with the phrase "With great power comes great responsibility."

Sure, one of the film's funniest scenes is the one where Strange has to keep changing his spell in progress due to last-minute edits by Peter. But again, do we blame Peter for remembering one more person he doesn't want to forget him, or do we blame Strange for not reviewing all the parameters of the spell with Peter before he even started?

It's not like Strange is the genie here. It's not like he's trying to use the exact semantics of Peter's request against him in order to deny him a wish on a technicality. Since he's on Peter's side, you'd think they'd want to sit down and hash out the spell over a couple of hours. 

Not so much.

Mysterio's unbelievable credibility

Another thing I didn't believe was that the world would believe Mysterio -- a "superhero" who had been famous for like a week -- over Spider-Man, an Avenger who had demonstrably saved the world, or at least his small part of it, on multiple occasions.

I tried to consider whether Mysterio had been known to the world longer than his three or four fights with the elementals, but I decided he had not been. Peter wasn't even aware of him until his school trip to Europe. In fact, Peter names him. Mysterio dies at the end of that school trip.

In this case, I think you can view it as a criticism of our sociopolitical landscape, not something that's supposed to be realistic. The conspiracy theorist talk show host played by J.K. Simmons is supposed to be a riff on Alex Jones. The things he says are not supposed to make sense, which makes it all the more of a sharp satire that so many millions of people believe him.

Still, as the core conflict for an entire movie, I didn't totally buy it.

Plus, aren't there schools other than M.I.T.?

Cool but not clever

Although I liked this movie quite a bit, it doesn't approach the rarefied air of the Marvel movies I have really loved in the past five years, such as the final two Avengers movies, the most recent Thor movie and the most recent Ant-Man movie.

My ultimate assessment is that all the multiverse stuff was cool, but not particularly clever.

When you look at any individual detail of this movie, it doesn't care much about explaining itself. Villains just appear, Spider-Men just appear. There's no rhyme or reason to where they appear or when they appear. They appear at the time the plot needs them to, and only because the plot needs them to appear.

I think the key to a head-trippy film involving paradoxes is that the paradoxes themselves should be clever. The guiding principle behind the making of Back to the Future was the unanticipated repercussions of traveling through time. Everything that happens is an offshoot of a paradox or an attempt to avoid one.

No Way Home doesn't care about paradoxes. All it really wants to do is assemble a bunch of different characters from three different cinematic threads and figure out a way for them to coexist. 

And it does that in a cool way. Just not a clever one.

                                                             ******************

Okay, I think that's enough subheadings for today.

"Children, what do you know about Avengers: Endgame?"

My plan to watch the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies with my kids before taking them to No Way Home on Saturday -- thereby fitting in a crucial end-of-year screening while also getting credit for a family activity -- hit an unanticipated snag. 

All was going fine until mid-way through our first viewing, 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, on Sunday afternoon. The kids were enjoying it, laughing in the right spots, providing the sort of commentary about the action that indicates full engagement.

Then I realized that our viewing of the Marvel movies out of sequence would finally have its first negative repercussions when we got to the next movie.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first movie released after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the official beginning of the MCU's Phase Four. Where spoilers had never been a problem previously, they would immediately become so at this juncture. 

And though I'm sure you've seen Avengers: Endgame, now would be the correct time to issue a SPOILER ALERT.

Until now, the only things that could be "spoiled" from earlier Marvel movies were various plot-based twists and turns in the serpentine narrative, which is now 27 movies in length, and was already 21 at the time Endgame was released. Because these are superhero movies, the hero generally survives, leaving only weird references to Sokovia and the like as unexperienced events that could throw my kids for a loop, but only momentarily as they would just forget them and move on.

The death of Tony Stark, however, changed all that.

And while I heard my kids laughing and providing commentary, my mind raced ahead to how I was going to deal with the fact that they didn't know this had happened. It was like my worries of The Empire Strikes Back being prematurely spoiled all over again.

Watching the Avengers movies before Saturday was out of the question, even if I were inclined to do so. Even just watching Endgame was out of the question, as I would never dream of depriving someone of at least Infinity War as part one of the two-part story. I would also never dream of watching a three-hour movie with my kids, especially not this week. Then there's the fact that Infinity War contains what I consider the most shocking and potentially traumatizing moment in the entire MCU, the strangulation death of _____ by Thanos at the beginning. (I didn't give a spoiler warning for Infinity War, so I'll just leave out the name of that character.) It's that exact moment that caused me to wade into MCU viewings with my kids only very gingerly. It might be even more traumatizing considering that we only recently watched and quite enjoyed a show devoted entirely to this character. (Oops, so much for being vague.)

But I didn't want to abandon these viewings either. I need to get in Spider-Man: No Way Home on before I close off my 2021 rankings. With the hype it has received, not seeing it in time to rank it is just not an option. 

I thought of just skipping Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is like a non-stop Tony Stark memorial from start to finish. (Or from Stark to finish, you could say.) At least the kids would have one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie before seeing the newest one. But as I had already promised them both movies, I couldn't really renege now. Nor, as a proud film enthusiast and curator, did I consider it responsible to show them the third in a trilogy without showing them the second.

So I decided to put the issue to them and see what they wanted to do about it.

Tuesday afternoon I asked the older one, who is 11, the question you see in the title of this post. He was helping me put a shade cover on our new trampoline at the time.

"Something about Thanos gathering infinity stones to wipe out half the population."

"That's Avengers: Infinity War," I explained. "What do you know about Endgame?"

"Then nothing I guess," was the response.

The playground chatter that had given him the details of Thanos' master plan had not produced the end result from the second movie. I guess a bejeweled glove is more fascinating to the playground crowd than the death of Iron Man.

So I asked him what he thought of the fact that there would be spoilers from Endgame in the next Spider-Man movie. When he asked what kind of spoiler, I said it had to do with characters dying.

"No, I want to avoid that," he said.

Damn.

I punted for now and returned my focus to attaching the trampoline roof.

Because I had deemed Tuesday the best time to watch Far From Home before Saturday, and around 5:30 the best time to schedule the watch, I had to return to the topic later on, this time involving his brother.

I said we could either watch it and have the spoiler occur, or we could skip this movie and just go straight to third -- which a friend had told me did not include very much, if any, talk of Stark's death, if he remembered correctly.

The older one wanted to skip, the younger seemed horrified by that idea.

We settled on the compromise that I and my eight-year-old would watch Far From Home, and my 11-year-old would skip it. But almost immediately, he decided that if we were going to watch the movie he would just watch it as well.

As it turned out, I almost didn't need to worry.

One of the very first things that happens in the movie -- after the cold open featuring Michael Keaton's Vulture -- is a tribute on Peter Parker's high school news program to the fallen Avengers. Not just Stark, but also Captain America, Black Widow and Vision. I sat there their cringing at the enormity of the information being dumped on them. (After all, we'd watched Vision in Wandavision as well.)

You know what? Went right over their heads. 

Huh? 

Kids are funny sometimes.

I have to wonder if they didn't process it because they thought they knew how movies worked, and there was no way any of these characters could be dead. (Is Steve Rogers dead or is he just really, really old?) 

When I was able to exhale, I ventured a pause to make sure they understood what The Blip was and how it worked, how some characters were gone for five years and then came back.

"Don't spoil it!" the 11-year-old said. "Wait is that the spoiler?"

I hit play again without confirming or denying.

It went on this way, becoming more comical with each oblique reference to Tony's death. And by "oblique" I don't mean the references were indirect to any normal adult. My children apparently needed someone to say "Tony Stark is dead" for them to actually get that this happened.

Phrasing very close to that, which could not be mistaken for anything else, finally occurred during the "nightmare" that Mysterio creates for Spider-Man, one of several illusions Mysterio creates whose logistics are basically impossible to understand. At this point it took the eight-year-old to finally ask the question:

"Wait, did Tony Stark die?"

By way of confirmation, I put my hand on his back.

The revelation didn't derail anything. The laughter and the commentary continued. The kids loved the movie -- one or both of them called it their favorite of all time, which is something they say after basically every movie they see. (Most recently: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) I myself liked the movie a lot better than I had the first time. I still find the Mysterio stuff kind of weak, but anything related to the high school students is gold, and I like Zendaya a lot more these days than I ever used to.

Some concern for Tony did finally arrive during the closing credits, at which point, the 11-year-old asked if Tony had come back to life yet in the ensuing Marvel movies. Maybe they get how these movies work after all.

"Not so far," I said, helpfully leaving the door open for his eventual resuscitation, if any emotional comfort was needed in that moment, if there had been any tainting of another recent first-time viewing -- the original Iron Man.

It doesn't seem that there was. They were screaming and bouncing on the trampoline a few minutes later.

"Not so far," my response to the prospect of Tony returning, was not a lie. I get how these movies work too. You telling me we're never going to see Iron Man in a movie again? Of course we are. He just won't be played by Robert Downey Jr. (Or maybe he even will be. Never rule anything out. The aforementioned Michael Keaton is playing Batman again, isn't he?)

So a tricky scenario tackled in the best way it could have been tackled: head on.

And at least now they'll have the context for all the ways I imagine their noodle is going to be fried in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I won't be able to pause this one to explain anything that's happening, including the Easter Eggs for the five live action Spider-Man movies that they haven't seen. 

My wife, who was expecting to be busy during that block of time, may actually join us for the viewing. She probably hasn't seen a Spider-Man movie since the Tobey Maguire original. Let's hope her adult brain can just go with it in the moment.