AI will be Spider-Man’s only friend in ‘Brand New Day.’ The internet is losing its mind over it

Since the massive success of Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, fans have been eagerly awaiting the next Peter Parker-centered film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Five years later, the fourth MCU Spider-Man film, subtitled Brand New Day, is finally coming to theaters—but a reveal in the screenplay’s first page has some fans abandoning the hype train. Director Destin Daniel Cretton shared the first three pages of Brand New Day with Entertainment Weekly, complete with annotations from himself, stars Zendaya and Tom Holland, and other department heads. The pages reveal that the story picks up nine months after the events of No Way Home. Spoiler alert: Peter Parker, forced to erase himself from the memories of everyone on Earth (including his girlfriend MJ and best friend Ned), now lives in isolation. “For the first time, Peter is entirely alone,” Cretton emphasizes in the margins. The opening scene sees Peter fiddling with homemade technology, with another annotation pointing out that he no longer has access to money or gadgets from his former mentor Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. “All of his tech needs to have been made by Peter,” the annotation reads. As Peter’s first in-scene line of dialogue reveals, that tech includes an AI assistant named E.V., the source of the internet’s ire. “Could you check the calibration on my targeting matrix?” Peter asks, and E.V. gets to work. Another note from Cretton says that with his new isolated lifestyle, E.V. is “sadly, the closest thing Peter has to a friend.” ‘The biggest eye roll of my life’: Social media rags on E.V. E.V.’s presence in the screenplay was immediately divisive on social media. The mere inclusion of AI, let alone an AI companion, was enough to immediately turn some people off from Brand New Day. “And just like that I’m not excited for this movie anymore,” one user wrote. “I don’t like Peter befriending ChatGPT and asking stuff like ‘should I ask her out’ or whatever, no matter how ‘normalized&