As soon as the Spider-Man: Brand New Day credits rolled, I felt immensely grateful for all my friends and texted my group chat, “The moral of the new Spider-Man movie is that if you don’t have friends, you will literally die.” As my sister and I walked out of the theatre, I turned to her and said, “Oh my God. That was a friendship movie.”
A friendship movie, to me, isn’t necessarily a high school drama or a coming-of-age college flick. While films like Dil Chahta Hai, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Bridesmaids are undeniably centred around friendship, the same themes are now emerging in unexpected movies. Take Project Hail Mary, for instance. It was marketed as a sci-fi thriller about saving the world, but I think it is, at its heart, a movie about having a friend when you are going through a tough time. I know this because after my best friend and I watched the film, he sent me a thousand Grace and Rocky edits set to our favourite songs, and we immediately started arguing about which one of us was which character. Or take The Sheep Detectives, which initially appeared to be the funniest, most adorable murder mystery of all time, but left my friends and me bawling during movie night. It is, quite blatantly, a friendship movie, told through the relationships between humans and animals and the dynamics among the sheep themselves. Beneath the murder mystery, it’s a story about grief, love and community. Who knew a movie with talking sheep could be so deep?
A life increasingly centred around our pals has become a defining characteristic of Gen Z. There is nothing deeper to us than friendship. As the world becomes increasingly fragmented, friends have become a topic we rave about with a seriousness once reserved for love. So, of course, it makes sense that the new Spider-Man movie is a friendship movie.
The previous film, Spider-Man: No Way Home, ended with the whole world forgetting that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. Spider-Man: Brand New Day shows us the direct consequences of that decision. The situation forces Peter to confront all the ordinary things that make being a young adult difficult: loneliness, grief, broken relationships and lost friends. Even though he continues to be the friendly neighbourhood superhero, Peter is completely isolated and overworked, coming home to an empty apartment every day. His best friend, Ned Leeds, and his girlfriend, MJ, don’t remember him, and he watches their lives from afar, occasionally stalking them through Ned’s social media account.
