Sam Raimi’s 2004 skyscraper-to-elevated-train brawl between Spider-Man and Doc Ock still gets cited by critics as the genre’s high-water mark, right down to the unmasked Peter being cradled by New York bystanders. That nostalgia has resurfaced with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, whose $360 million opening and reviews praising it as the most grounded Spider-Man story since Raimi have put the franchise’s Raimi-era roots back in the spotlight.
A crowded elevated train, a masked hero unconscious in the arms of strangers, and one line that still lands twenty-two years later: “He’s just a kid. No older than my son.” Sam Raimi’s 2004 showdown between Spider-Man and Doc Ock fused stunt work with real heartbreak in a way that critics keep circling back to when the genre needs a measuring stick. That comparison feels especially loaded this month, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day setting box office records and drawing the same word critics reached for back then: Raimi. Six stories this month trace how Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster keeps getting judged against a train fight from 2004.
An unforgettable moment in superhero storytelling
In 2004, Sam Raimi staged a fight that superhero cinema has been chasing ever since. In Spider-Man 2, Tobey Maguire’s web-slinger and Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus tumble from a New York skyscraper onto an elevated train, then battle across its speeding cars. Twenty-two years later, that sequence still tops critics’ lists, and this summer’s box office suggests audiences never stopped craving what it delivered.
Why the train scene is still unmatched
The set piece earns its reputation less through spectacle than through what follows it. An unmasked, unconscious Spider-Man is carried by ordinary commuters, one of whom murmurs the now-famous line about the boy under the mask. Raimi paired then-state-of-the-art action filmmaking with genuine pathos, a combination outlets say dozens of later superhero films have failed to replicate.
Den of Geek recently argued the train fight remains the sequence to beat in the entire genre, a consensus echoed across fan rankings and critical retrospectives year after year.
A perfect backdrop for Spider-Man: Brand New Day
The Raimi nostalgia has rarely felt more relevant. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Tom Holland, opened on July 31, 2026 and set the biggest domestic opening weekend in history with a final $360 million, edging past Avengers: Endgame’s 2019 record of $357.1 million. The film picks up after Doctor Strange’s spell erased Peter Parker from everyone’s memory, including MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon).
Critics have drawn the comparison directly. Alexander Zalben of Comic Book Club wrote that Cretton “has done is create the most purely Spider-Man movie since, perhaps, Raimi’s Spider-Man 2,” while Rotten Tomatoes framed early reviews around the most grounded, mature Spider-Man story yet. Bounding Into Comics went further, calling it the most unapologetically Raimi-coded entry in the franchise in over a decade.
The formula that keeps paying off
What the train scene proved in 2004, Brand New Day is confirming in 2026: audiences respond when Spider-Man’s humanity anchors the action. The cast reflects that street-level approach, with Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle alongside Sadie Sink, Tramell Tillman and Michael Mando. Cretton’s film became the fastest ever to gross $700 million domestically, and by its third weekend it had crossed $2 billion worldwide, adding roughly $70 million at home for the second-best domestic third weekend of all time.