Prime Video’s Invincible Is Beating Brand New Day At Its Own Game

For a franchise that was supposed to have died alongside Thanos seven years ago, the MCU is looking pretty healthy. Marvel’s latest installment, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is knocking down records for fun, while fans and critics have been united in their praise. The enduring popularity of Tom Holland’s Spidey era isn’t exactly surprising, but Kevin Feige will still be breathing a sigh of relief that the series hasn’t lost momentum as it swings from strength to strength.

Because, as popular as Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s Holland/Zendaya double-act is, the fourth installment represented a sizable risk.

Since his first solo outing in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, the scale of Spider-Man’s adventures has been steadily increasing. He started off local by clipping the Vulture’s wings, accidentally went to space alongside the Avengers, traveled the world to solve Mysterio, then jumped headfirst into the multiverse for No Way Home.

With Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the Holland era took a very deliberate, but also very noticeable, step back. It’s a more personal story, a story very strongly rooted in New York, and a story that puts Spider-Man back in touch with his neighborhood origins after feeling the madness of the multiverse, courtesy of Doctor Strange. The fact that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is able to make this shift without feeling less important than past entries (and without denting its popularity, evidently) confirms that the risk to ‘go smaller’ has paid off.

While Spidey’s grassroots return is undoubtedly impressive, it’s a transition that a Peter Parker-esque hero is currently undergoing himself on Prime Video.

Invincible Season 5 Mirrors Spider-Man’s Brand New Day Arc

Image via MovieStillsDB

The DNA of Spider-Man played a big role in the creation of Invincible. Like his wall-crawling counterpart, Mark Grayson is a hopeful hero attempting to balance newfound powers with regular teenage life, his biggest challenges coming when those two different worlds collide. Mark’s origin story involves the loss of a father figure (albeit in very different circumstances than Uncle Ben), Mark wears himself to the bone trying to juggle education with superhero duties, and Invincible‘s Guardians of the Globe serve as the Avengers of Mark’s universe. Atom Eve and Mary Jane aren’t exactly dissimilar either.

Invincible was even able to pay homage to its Marvel predecessor in a crossover arc that saw Mark and Spider-Man canonically team up. Rights issues prevented this happening in the Prime Video series, with Spidey instead replaced by a pale imitation referred to as “Agent Spider,” who was fooling absolutely no one.

At no point has Invincible ever tried to avoid its parallels to Marvel’s web-slinger, but some of those similarities only become apparent when taking a wider view of both franchises. Sure enough, Peter Parker’s trajectory in the MCU is broadly the same as Mark’s across the first five seasons of Invincible.

Like Spider-Man, Mark initially focused on lower-level villains like Doc Seismic and the Mauler Twins, before fate took him to outer space to fight a larger threat. Just as Peter battled against a villain with an almighty personal grudge during the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Invincible wrestled with a moral conundrum posed by the grieving Powerplex. Mark then embarked on a universe-hopping string of meetings with his alternate selves, almost ripping apart the fabric of reality while doing so.

Invincible seasons 1-4 are essentially the equivalent of Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Continuing the pattern, Invincible season 5 consciously scales the story back, with Mark returning to Earth in his home universe and fighting more conventional villains, such as Dinosaurus. As Peter Parker steps away from franchise crossovers and sci-fi shenanigans in space for his fourth theatrical adventure, Invincible is gently returning focus to protecting innocent civilians from cartoonish criminals after the reality-shaking campaigns against Angstrom Levy and the Viltrumites.

Invincible Season 5 & Brand New Day Are Both ‘Big’ In More Subtle Ways

Caution: spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Brand New Day (yes, the one you’ve probably heard by now)

The genius of Spider-Man: Brand New Day is that it manages to feel epic without leaving Earth or breaking down interdimensional borders. For one thing, it raises the personal stakes of Peter Parker’s story by examining the fallout of Doctor Strange’s spell from the end of No Way Home. The MCU could’ve easily had MJ and Ned remember Peter in Brand New Day‘s opening minutes, but the script refuses to shirk responsibility, tackling the trauma head-on, and highlighting the mental cost of saving the universe.

Based on Invincible season 4’s ending, Mark Grayson will experience something similar in the show’s next run. The Viltrumite War has clearly scarred Mark deeply, and will continue to haunt him into Invincible season 5 and beyond. At this point, viewers know Invincible never shies away from depicting the inner turmoil of its characters, so can expect Mark’s PTSD after returning home from the battlefield to become a prominent theme.

Spider-Man Brand New Day also took great strides to set up the future of the MCU by introducing Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey. Hardly the next Thanos or Doctor Doom, the arrival of Jean naturally brings the issue of mutants to the fore ahead of Marvel’s X-Men reboot in 2028.

Thragg doesn’t much resemble a Jean Gray figure, even if you ignore the mustache, but Invincible season 5 will continue the Viltrumite threat in a less overt way by having the surviving aliens assimilate into the human population, effectively holding Earth hostage. It might not be war, but something big is bubbling beneath the surface and setting up major events to come, not unlike how Spider-Man: Brand New Day promises big things in the MCU’s future.

The strange quirk to this duality between Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Invincible season 5 is that, on the surface, it looks like the Prime Video series is following Tom Holland’s lead. Truthfully, of course, Robert Kirkman’s Invincible comics came first, so MCU Spidey has actually been following in the footsteps of Mark Grayson (although perhaps not consciously), and now Mark is making the exact same journey in animated form, almost side-by-side with his counterpart from the Marvel universe.