This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

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Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

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Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.

In their fledgling but fascinating career thus far, the director Jane Schoenbrun has been consumed by the pop culture that consumes us. They’ve already proved to be an urgent voice on the matter: Their first feature, the low-budget We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, focused on the allure of online “creepypastas” and weird YouTube rabbit holes that despondent teenagers might go down. The second, I Saw the TV Glow, examined the psychological fallout of two isolated adolescents obsessed with a cult television series. Schoenbrun’s newest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is similarly interested in nostalgia: It follows Kris (played by Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a gruesome slasher franchise from yesteryear called Camp Miasma. As she does so, the past and the cynical present blend into a transfixing dilution of Schoenbrun’s interests and fears about identity and self through the prism of mass media.

Schoenbrun’s previous films were intensely melancholic affairs, and it’s immediately clear that Camp Miasma is having a bit more fun with the same themes. It jabs at Hollywood’s impulse toward rampant intellectualization—and corporatization—of the cinematic junk food of decades past. Kris, who has a minor Sundance hit under her belt, endeavors to create a “woke” and hip take on Camp Miasma without alienating its enduring fan base. A charmingly stylized early montage establishes the franchise as akin to many 1980s VHS cult classics, garishly mixing gore, nudity, and an eerie campfire vibe. The film’s many sequels yielded diminishing returns, and the series eventually stooped to wacky concepts à la Friday the 13th—the main monster, Little Death, who carries a spear and wears a mask shaped like a cubic air vent, traveled to Manhattan, then space, and so on. At her hotel, Kris watches the original film and eagerly takes notes; during a cheesy sex scene, she scribbles DESIRE in her notepad and underlines it forcefully.

Yet Kris, despite her intent to take a cerebral approach, also comes at the project with a teen sensibility. Any movie nerd might recognize her behavior: When she stops off at a gas station on a work trip, she grabs fistfuls of candy and then lazily spins through the cheapo DVD rack, excitedly calling a friend when she finds a junky Camp Miasma installment for sale. The opportunity to visit the now-abandoned sleepaway camp where the first entry was shot is both useful to her as a director and delightful to her as a fan.

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The film mostly takes place there, and Kris spends a bizarre weekend with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a reclusive actor who starred in the original Camp Miasma but refused to participate in any of its follow-ups. Billy, however, now lives at the campground with the goal of giving herself what appears to be a peculiar form of exposure therapy. Anderson, herself a towering legend of genre television and cinema, is an imperiously fun and sexy figure for Einbinder’s nervous and dorky character to bounce off of. Billy seems both enticed and exhausted by Kris, who professes her struggle to bring an academic eye to the world of Camp Miasma. Billy reminds her that the franchise’s initial appeal was straightforward: The draw was “flesh and fluids.”

As Kris spends more time with Billy, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma metamorphoses from an industry satire into a dreamlike reflection on how what we watch can shape us, no matter how lowbrow. Schoenbrun renders the desolate grounds with beautiful matte-painted backgrounds; as Kris and Billy watch the old film, the fuzzy visuals and synthy score bleed away into contemporary CGI blood and carnage. Both the throwback and present-day imagery look surreal; even though Kris can identify the obvious tropes in Camp Miasma, she can’t seem to face the power that familiar scripts hold over her. And in a fantastical twist, Little Death somehow finds its way out of the Camp Miasma movies, emerging from the on-site lake.

But this is not a tale of cinema coming to life and invading the mundane real world; it’s more about two different styles of storytelling blending into one. As past and present, “fiction” and “reality” swirl together for an inscrutable final act, Schoenbrun finds a fresh way to make an incisive observation about 21st-century life: Today’s moviegoers are immersed in their screens and hungry for pop culture, to the point that a trashy flick such as Camp Miasma can feel intrinsic to Kris’s sense of self. Someone like Kris may want to interrogate that relationship over and over in search of meaning, but perhaps it’s best not to subject what we watch to endless analysis and meta-critique. Instead, we may be better off embracing how we feel.

Tony follows a very familiar sort of 19-year-old menace—the kind of character coming-of-age movies like this were made for. He’s someone you might have crushed on in college: He sulks around with worldly paperbacks stuffed into his rear pockets, dresses in leather jackets even if it’s unseasonably warm, and seems to wear a permanent glower. Yet Tony, as played by Dominic Sessa, is more than just a pretentious bad boy; he’s starting to work his way toward something meaningful. His full name also just so happens to be Anthony Bourdain, who the audience likely knows will one day become a renowned chef and author, tapping his back-of-house experiences for material; eventually, his celebrity as a TV personality will transcend his punchy writing about the life of a cook.

The film, directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, should be hamstrung by this conclusion. On paper, Tony sounds like it requires the audience to understand something that doesn’t happen during the movie; it saves calling Tony by his full name until its final moments. This often irritating, barely grown dilettante will become someone important when he does a little more maturing, off-screen. The truth about Bourdain, however, is that he really was a cinematic figure, even in his wayward adolescence—at least if his evocative writing on that period is to be believed.

Tony draws from Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 best seller that laid bare the rough-and-tumble world of haute cuisine from the perspective of a jaded yet passionate New York chef. But the screenplay adapts only the early chapters, which cover Bourdain’s tentative beginnings in the cooking profession, including one teenage summer he spent, frequently hungover, working in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. Presenting that appetizer as a rich, earthy main course somehow comes together beautifully. Tony is not burdened by the complex details of Bourdain’s adult life, and Sessa is not asked to imitate a well-known man who spent the latter half of his career on TV. Instead, he just has to capture the feeling of possibility, wrapped up in the recognizable foolishness of youth. He and Johnson both do a beautiful job of it.

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The viewer meets Tony at Vassar College, where he spent two years before dropping out. The school year is over, and he’s hoping to gain a summer writing fellowship that will impress his ditzy dad, Pierre (played by Rich Sommer), and his far more judgmental mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk). When that falls through, Tony instead follows a crush named Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she has a summer job; he eventually stumbles into a gig washing dishes at the Flagship, a seafood spot. The staff is made up of the hard-partying guys one might expect (including a garrulous Stavros Halkias and a brooding Leo Woodall). For much of the run time, Tony is an observer, sucking up what knowledge he can while trying to project a precious aloofness—a trait that beguiles many a young man in search of inspiration.

His muse is found, primarily, in a character simply called “Chef” (Antonio Banderas). He’s a wise, older Brazilian man who silently greets the ocean every morning and still loves his trade enough to make his own ketchup rather than buy bottles of Heinz. Banderas could play this role in his sleep: the meditative, somewhat elusive mentor, delivering advice with simultaneous bluntness and poeticism. But he might actually be the best actor alive who could inhabit that sort of sensei role without it feeling clichéd and off-the-rack. Chef exists mostly to invest Tony with a sense of pride in what he does, even if it’s the manual labor of cooking rather than whatever intellectual pursuits Tony thinks he should follow. Johnson understands that this respect for artistry was what made Bourdain such an enduring figure.

That inherent empathy is how Tony gets away with being a biopic that ends in the early chapters of a person’s life. It’s an origin story for how a man became a chef, yes, yet it’s more concerned with how someone might fall in love with a scrappy culture and the beautiful way that cuisine blends the highbrow and the low. Tony is learning how to create shellfish delicacies; at the same time, he’s cracking open oysters and cleaning plates. (He’s also holding his own among seedy, profane company, the kind of ribald back-and-forth that Johnson can present with hilarious immediacy—be it in his prior biopic, BlackBerry, or in the riotous Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.) Although Tony is a necessarily minor piece of storytelling, it feels deceptively major nevertheless—and is infused with just enough of its subject’s real-world charisma.