Peng Zhang Built Spider-Man: Brand New Day's 20-Ninja Hand Battle to Read Without CG
Posted: August 11, 2026
Stunt coordinator Peng Zhang walked The Credits through the design of the Hand ninja set piece in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the through-line is a coordinator's argument against handing action to post. “We built up a lot of movement for Spider-Man based on it feeling like a Spider-Man move. We didn't want to rely on CG,” Zhang said, adding that the movement vocabulary follows from concept: “all the movements really depend on what kind of concepts we have.”
The centerpiece runs 20 ninjas as a single attacking organism rather than a crowd of individual opponents — a structure Zhang drew from a peacock dance he had watched, with Snow (Fan Xiaoshuang) as the body and the rest of the unit fanned out as wings. That kind of group choreography lives or dies on rehearsal and spacing, and it is the sort of blocking problem that gets solved on the floor, not on a workstation.
The department was sized to match: 56 stunt performers, stunt coordinators Leonard Woodcock and Marlow Warrington-Mattei, fight coordinator Xiang Yang Xu, and rigging coordinators Dan Brown and Anthony Genova III, with Luke Scott and Anthony Baniaga doubling Spider-Man. On the camera side, second unit “A” operator Dan Gamble worked primarily on a Stabileye Arkos handheld gimbal, backed by techno cranes and Steadicam, so the lens could move three-dimensionally around performers instead of parking off to the side. Elsewhere in the picture the team flipped cars for a tank sequence and used a practical on-set model for Hulk's arrival to keep the impact weight real.
Update — October 6, 2026: A behind-the-scenes featurette released this week places the Hand sequence inside a prison and shows how much of it was built for that box. Director Destin Daniel Cretton kept the fight practical rather than handing it to green screen, and Zhang built equipment specific to the confined location, including aerial rigging worked inside it — bladed weapons and smoke pellets in a space with no room to cheat distance. Zhang’s note on where the sequence turns is a camera note as much as a choreography one: “We had to show these moments through the camera to tell this story, and that moment when the eyes go black, and he stops the sword is huge! The close-up, and his eyes now black, tell us Spider-Man is going to kick a–.”