Sony and Marvel’s latest collaboration, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, has shattered box office records in less than a week, earning $1 billion worldwide and securing the biggest opening weekend in Hollywood history. The film’s immediate success reinforces why Sony is probably never going to give up the Spider-Man film rights, and it highlights how Marvel Studios was smart to strike a deal to bring the character into its own films. Yet, despite this triumph, the larger MCU has been stuck in a confounding slump for the past few years, and this latest hit is not necessarily a sign that Marvel has figured out how to get things back on track. Past live-action Spider-Man films have performed consistently well: both Homecoming and No Way Home crossed the $100 million mark during their opening weekends, and Far From Home took only six days to pull in $185 million. What sets Brand New Day apart is the speed with which it has shattered records and become one of Marvel and Sony’s most fruitful collaborations. The film is a testament to the fact that audiences still have an appetite for big-screen comic book spectacle when the stars align just right. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and cowritten by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, the movie strikes a strong balance between Sony’s solo Spider-Man movies and Marvel’s larger crossover events. It includes classic Spider-Man rogues such as John Bernthal’s Punisher and Michael Mando’s Scorpion, along with Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, but the core story is about Peter Parker dealing with the emotional consequences of erasing himself from the world’s memory. This self-contained yet interconnected approach contrasts with the narrative sprawl that has troubled the Multiverse Saga. The Multiverse Saga, which began with WandaVision and will end with Avengers: Secret Wars, has struggled to maintain that kind of narrative cohesion. Marvel has been juggling far more projects than Sony, which recently pumped the brakes on making Spider-Man spinoff movies. Mixed reactions to trailers for the studio’s next big feature suggest audiences may not be excited about what’s coming next. Avengers: Doomsday will bring most of Marvel’s heroes together to fight a version of Doctor Doom portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., likely using the multiverse to explain why Doom looks exactly like Iron Man, and it will definitely bring a handful of the live-action 20th Century Studios X-Men into the MCU. Marvel is clearly using Doomsday and next year’s Secret Wars to put a period on the Multiverse Saga and start fresh after years of the franchise being too unwieldy. The films and Downey Jr.’s rehiring are also Marvel’s way of moving on from the Kang-filled future it gave up on after jettisoning Jonathan Majors. Amid that uncertainty, Brand New Day offers a promising template for the future. Instead of introducing Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey as a charming telepath, the film presents her as a teenager willing to destroy anyone who gets in her way as she searches for her sister. Both Greys are mutants with natural abilities that make them dangerous, but what pushes Jean to deadly violence is the way the government is hunting them down in hopes of weaponizing them. Jean might not want to hurt innocent people, but she does in a very public way, and it is easy to imagine her actions becoming the basis for human-mutant tensions going forward. This grounded framing shows how the MCU can touch on classic elements of X-Men comics lore without feeling like a stealth X-Men movie. Kevin Feige has been open about new iterations of the X-Men being key to Marvel’s plans for the future. If the studio wants audiences to become invested in Charles Xavier and his students, it would do well to lean into Brand New Day’s strongest beats. Spider-Man has now given audiences a promising taste of the MCU’s new mutants; Marvel has a chance to keep audiences hooked if it does not drop the ball like Fox. For Somali fans, including diaspora viewers in London, Minneapolis, and Toronto, Brand New Day’s record run is another sign of Spider-Man’s staying power; the film’s mutant-heavy story also offers a glimpse of the X-Men revival that many MCU followers have been waiting for.