Entertainment
New Spider-Man Director Has Already Fixed Marvel’s Biggest Mistake
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a new chapter for everyone’s favorite web-head. In addition to a plot that teams him up with everyone from Bruce Banner to the Punisher, Tom Holland’s Spidey finally has a new director calling the shots. While his previous three films were directed by Jon Watts, this latest adventure is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. He’s a known quantity, having previously directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Still, it’s a big leap from Shang-Chi to Marvel’s most popular hero, and many fans are understandably nervous about whether Cretton can stick the landing.
If you’re similarly skeptical, you might be reassured by the latest update from the director. In a recent interview with Time Magazine, he discussed that one of his biggest goals with Brand New Day was to capture as much of the action on-camera via practical stunts rather than adding things later via special effects. Honestly, it’s a great approach to capturing the sheer physicality of Spider-Man, which can be downright hypnotic if done right. Even more importantly, it’s an approach that can fix Marvel’s biggest problem: ruining cool moments with some of the worst CGI known to man.
Making Everything Feel More Real
In a recent interview with Time, Destin Daniel Cretton opened up about his creative approach to Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This included frequently asking Tom Holland to do things that “seemed impossible” and “felt almost ridiculous” to ask for. Without complaint, the Spider-Man actor would always pull off the stunt. This pleasantly surprised Cretton, who had made his own moves to ensure the film had killer onscreen action. “We brought a lot of our stunt team from Shang-Chi onto the project,” he said. “The goal was to try to get as much in camera as we possibly could.”
Why was this approach so important to Cretton, though? “One of the draws to doing this Spider-Man movie was that we are seeing Spider-Man go back to basics. We’re seeing a street-level Spider-Man, and we wanted that to be across the board,” he said. “We kept talking about this idea of a ‘grounded movie.’ We were taking that mentality into the stunts, into the action design, to see Spider-Man doing things that feel almost possible and not to rely as heavily on VFX.”
Bad CGI? Marvel Can Do This All Day
This is an excellent way to handle Spider-Man, a character who historically protects a single city rather than the entire world. Grounded stunts play into the idea that Brand New Day will have the hero fighting without the benefit of any fancy technology from Tony Stark. Capturing Tom Holland doing killer stunts on his own instead of sprucing everything up with special effects is a great way to emphasize the physicality of the role and of Spider-Man. It’s also an awesome way of fixing Marvel’s biggest mistake: namely, ruining otherwise great movies with crappy effects!
The most infamous example of this is Bruce Banner in the Hulkbuster armor from Avengers: Infinity War. It’s a nearly perfect Marvel movie (exceeded only by Endgame), but it’s impossible to think about this film without remembering Mark Ruffalo’s head just floating above that armor like something out of a bad video game cutscene. Similarly, the first Black Panther (which is an absolute masterpiece of worldbuilding) is marred by a fight between BP and Killmonger that transforms the movie into a fighting game with crappy CGI. Thor: Love and Thunder featured a floating head effect that was so bad it had to be fixed before the Disney+ release.
The list goes on, including a bad cartoon-looking version of Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok and some genuinely WTF transformation sequences in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. With Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Destin Daniel Cretton is addressing this issue head-on by embracing practical stunts and eschewing fancy VFX or crappy CGI whenever possible. Considering that this movie might earn closer to $2 billion than $1 billion, future franchise films are likely to follow the director’s lead in search of their own success. In this way, Cretton may do something even Spider-Man couldn’t do: save Marvel from ruining its own films with effects as cheap as they are ugly!
Entertainment
In case you forgot, AMC movie tickets are 50% off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays — its a year-round thing
HALF OFF MOVIE TICKETS: AMC Stubs members get 50% off adult evening movie tickets every Tuesday and Wednesday.
All Stubs tiers are eligible for the promo
It’s been over a year since AMC announced that evening movie tickets would be 50% off every Tuesday and Wednesday. That officially bumps the promo into “year-round” territory.
It only feels right to re-remind you of how easy it is to get cheap movie tickets, given the nonstop bangers that summer 2026 is blessing us with. The Odyssey and Evil Dead Burn are the two must-see-in-theaters picks that come to mind as I write this post on July 21, but there’s bound to be a wicked box office lineup regardless of when you’re reading this. Heavy hitters like Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Resident Evil, Other Mommy, Verity, Avengers: Doomsday, Werwulf, and Dune: Part III are all making their theater debut in the last quarter of the year.
As long as you’re an AMC Stubs member, you can catch all of them for around $9 per person (ticket prices may vary slightly depending on your location). All tiers of the AMC Stubs membership have access to the promo, and Stubs members can buy up to 10 tickets at 50% off per showing. The discount applies to the base price of a standard adult evening ticket only — no IMAX.
Mashable Deals
To elevate the in-theater experience even more, Stubs members can also get 50% off small combos on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, like the heavenly pairing of popcorn and that good movie theater Coke. AMC’s snacks are apparently so elite that people are paying to order them at home through Uber Eats — and here you are, getting ’em for cheap.
Entertainment
Light Flip is a minimalistic, cheap flip phone that wont distract you
Remember Light, the New York-based company that builds super-simple, distraction-free, cheap smartphones?
It’s back with a new device; its first-ever flip phone called the Light Flip.
Once again, this is a cheap phone designed to free you from endless scrolling and social media addiction, while still offering the basic tools you need for everyday life. To do this, the company has built an Android-based, minimalistic operating system called LightOS that’s mostly textual and displays everything in just two colors. You do get access to music, messages, alarms, and other basic apps, but you don’t get to scroll the flashy new TIkTok video; that’s what your other phone is for.
The Light Flip is available in six colors: Black, Navy, Red, Pink, Yellow, and Light Gray.
Credit: Light Phone
The Light Flip doesn’t stray far from the formula, but approaches it with the body of a flip phone. In many ways, it’s far more simple than the company’s previous phone, the Light Phone III, which has an OLED touchscreen. The Light Flip is basically your flip phone of old, with a plastic body, a numeric, T9 keypad, some function buttons, and a 2.8-inch, non-touch display.
Mashable Light Speed
Numeric keypad? That’s right, but at least it supports T9 predictive input.
Credit: Light Phone
Inside, it’s powered by a MediaTek MT8873 chip, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and has a 50-megapixel camera and a (replaceable) 1,800mAh battery. Other amenities include a headphone jack (nice!), a USB-C port, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 5G connectivity.
The camera on the back has a 50-megapixel sensor but takes 12-megapixel images.
Credit: Light Phone
The numeric keypad might be a tough sell to folks that are used to touchscreens or at least QWERTY keyboards. Fortunately, the Light Flip does support voice-to-text and audio messaging, too.
The phone is available in six colors: Black, Navy, Red, Pink, Yellow, and Light Gray.
The Light Flip retails for $299 or $39 per month with the Light Service plan. It starts shipping in April 2027.
Entertainment
The Ecovacs Goat 01000 RTK robot lawn mower is on sale for under $700 at Amazon
SAVE $301: The Ecovacs Goat 01000 RTK robot lawn mower is on sale for $698.99 at Amazon, down from the standard price of $999.99. That’s a 30% discount.
$698.99
at Amazon
$999.99
Save $301
Not many people consider the chore of mowing the lawn to be enjoyable. It’s a task we often hand off to the neighborhood kids or a professional landscaping crew. But if you’d rather take matters into your own hands, we have a great solution these days. Plus, an affordable model is on sale.
As of July 21, the Ecovacs Goat 01000 RTK robot lawn mower is on sale for $698.99 at Amazon, marked down from the list price of $999.99. That winds up being a savings of $301 from a 30% discount.
By now you’ve probably seen a robot lawn mower rolling around someone’s yard, but it’s still an abnormal sight. Just like the rollout of robot vacuums, we’ll slowly start to see more and more robots take over mowing the lawn. As someone with allergies, I’m totally cool with never touching a lawn mower ever again.
The Ecovacs Goat 01000 is designed to maintain lawns that span up to 0.25 acres in size. You don’t need to worry about a wire perimeter because it maps your yard and stays on course thanks to LiDAR RTK navigation that even works in the shade or under trees. It can even avoid obstacles when mowing in dark conditions.
Mashable Deals
The small mower body that measures 2.3 feet means it can mow in tight areas like between raised vegetable beds or small walkways. Plus, it has an IPX6 waterproof design. You get to decide on your ideal cutting length between 1.2 and 3.2 inches.
Today’s Amazon deal on the Ecovacs Goat 01000 applies to the robot mower with a care kit which includes 36 blades and an RTK AC adapter. Since the mower and the care kit are on sale for under $700, today is a great day to wave goodbye to the heavy and loud push mower and make the upgrade. Spend the rest of summer perfecting homemade slushies instead of doing yardwork.
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