\n\t\t\t\t\tSam 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.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
A crowded elevated train, a masked hero unconscious in the arms of strangers, and one line that still lands twenty-two years later: \u201cHe\u2019s just a kid. No older than my son.\u201d Sam Raimi\u2019s 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\u2019s blockbuster keeps getting judged against a train fight from 2004.<\/p>\n
An unforgettable moment in superhero storytelling<\/p>\n
In 2004, Sam Raimi staged a fight that superhero cinema has been chasing ever since. In Spider-Man 2, Tobey Maguire\u2019s web-slinger and Alfred Molina\u2019s 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\u2019 lists, and this summer\u2019s box office suggests audiences never stopped craving what it delivered.<\/p>\n
Why the train scene is still unmatched<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Den of Geek recently argued the train fight remains the sequence to beat<\/a> in the entire genre, a consensus echoed across fan rankings and critical retrospectives year after year.<\/p>\n A perfect backdrop for Spider-Man: Brand New Day<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, edging past Avengers: Endgame\u2019s 2019 record of $357.1 million. The film picks up after Doctor Strange\u2019s spell erased Peter Parker from everyone\u2019s memory, including MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon).<\/p>\n Critics have drawn the comparison directly. Alexander Zalben of Comic Book Club wrote that Cretton \u201chas done is create the most purely Spider-Man movie since, perhaps, Raimi\u2019s Spider-Man 2,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The formula that keeps paying off<\/p>\n What the train scene proved in 2004, Brand New Day is confirming in 2026: audiences respond when Spider-Man\u2019s 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\u2019s film became the fastest ever to gross $700 million<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Raimi’s 2004 skyscraper-to-elevated-train brawl between Spider-Man and Doc Ock still gets cited by critics as the genre’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":578895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-578894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}