It must be great to be Spider-Man, right? As Brand New Day showed, Peter Parker’s life was anything but – isolated from friends, grieving lost family, and operating in a city where the criminals want you dead and no one knows who you really are.

According to Tom Holland, that fairly depressing throughline was inspired largely by a joke from 2017’s The LEGO Batman Movie.

“Something that I always really loved from a superhero movie is the LEGO Batman Movie when they talk about how he must be having parties with all of his friends and dating supermodels and all this sort of stuff and then it cuts to him like in his house alone,” Holland told Accion Cine Series.

In the scene in question, Batman (voiced by Will Arnett) heads back to Wayne Manor after a successful day of crimefighting, only to be met with a sad plate of microwaved lobster thermidor and a lonely rewatch of Jerry Maguire.

“Sending that into [director Destin Daniel Cretton] being like this is a great little thing for us, we should do something like this,” Holland said. “I just think that it creates a lot of layers and people are going to yearn for Peter Parker to make some life changes so that he can find happiness and peace and love.”

As ever, it proves Holland’s instincts for Spider-Man are on point. He previously mentioned he “hated” a cut that was shaped by test screening feedback.

“It totally didn’t work. And it’s what the people were asking for, but it wasn’t quite what we wanted as the creatives,” Holland told Quotable prior to release. “But they learned lessons from that experience. So, a movie can change in a thousand different ways in the edit room.”

Aided by Holland’s Spider-Sense, Spider-Man: Brand New Day became a record breaker at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time in the US.

A re-release is now planned, with deleted scenes being put back into the cut.

For more, check out our ranking of best Spider-Man movies.