Tom Holland Reveals the Surprisingly Practical Reason ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Never Actually Filmed in New York

Spider-Man has always felt inseparable from New York City, the web-slinger swinging between skyscrapers that fans have long associated with the character’s very identity. So it might come as a surprise that the latest chapter in his story barely touched the city it’s supposedly set in.

That absence wasn’t due to budget constraints or creative reshuffling, but something considerably more mundane: the sheer logistical nightmare of actually shooting on real New York streets. Tom Holland has now offered his own explanation for why ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ opted to build its version of the city somewhere else entirely.

Speaking about the decision, Holland explained that when you shoot in New York, you can’t shut down streets no matter the reason, while in London the studios will pay to close a street for the day and effectively own it for filming. He added that trying to do the same thing in New York means you’ll end up in the middle of a scene only for someone to walk right in and ask for a picture.

That explanation lines up with how the production actually came together behind the scenes. Rather than filming on location in Manhattan, the crew rebuilt entire city blocks at Pinewood Studios in the UK, relying on a combination of immersive set construction, background plates of the real city, and canny location scouting to sell the illusion.

Glasgow ended up doing much of the heavy lifting as New York’s stand-in. The Scottish city played host to a major early action sequence involving an armored car chase through what’s supposed to be Manhattan, with the cast and crew shooting down Hutcheson Street, St Vincent Street and Bothwell Street to pull off the sequence.

The transformation required serious commitment from local authorities to pull off convincingly. More than fifty Glasgow roads were closed for at least two weeks to accommodate filming, with yellow New York-style taxis, American police cars, and even a tank rolling through the city center to complete the illusion for both cast and curious onlookers.

Glasgow wasn’t the only unlikely stand-in used throughout production, either. Basingstoke’s old Automobile Association headquarters doubled as a prison for a scene involving a runaway armored car, while Dorchester’s shuttered 19th-century prison, closed since 2014, hosted a climactic fight sequence involving Spider-Man and members of the shadowy Hand organization.

That approach marked a notable shift from how Holland’s previous outing came together. Unlike ‘No Way Home,’ which was largely shot on closed soundstages during pandemic restrictions, ‘Brand New Day’ began filming on a busy, functioning city street, with fans actually gathering to watch production unfold in real time, something Holland has said was a first for the franchise on day one of shooting.

For a character so deeply tied to New York’s identity, building the city elsewhere ended up being less about creative preference and more about basic production reality. Whatever city actually stood in for the Big Apple this time around, the finished result seems to have convinced audiences well enough that most moviegoers likely never noticed the switch.

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