The first thing the fans noticed was not the cold, nor the hunger after five hours standing in the rain, but the great wheel of Parque Aztlán, its spokes and rim lit blood-red and traced into a colossal spider web against the night sky. A summer storm had drenched Chapultepec, yet the crowd—many in homemade masks, clutching posters and Funko Pop figures—pressed against the barriers, their chants of “Tom, hermano, ya eres mexicano!” cutting through the wind. When Tom Holland, Zendaya and director Destin Daniel Cretton finally stepped onto the blue carpet, the roar that went up was less a greeting than a release, the culmination of an endurance test that had become, for those present, a measure of devotion.

Holland and Zendaya worked the line for over an hour, signing arms, posters and even a tattoo of Holland’s autograph inked onto a fan’s skin. On a stage beneath the illuminated wheel, a video prepared by residents of the Colonia Federal played: the neighbourhood’s streets are famously laid out in a web pattern, a quirk of urban design that has earned it the nickname “El Barrio de la Telaraña.” The actors watched, visibly moved, as locals welcomed them into a real-world geography of fandom. Holland, speaking in English and Spanish, told the crowd that the films were made “por ustedes,” while Zendaya, wearing a black lace gown and spider-shaped earrings, reflected on Peter Parker’s ordinariness as the key to his bond with audiences. “He could be any of us,” she said, “our brother, our best friend.”

Then came the flag. As the event drew to a close, a fan pressed a Mexican tricolour into the stars’ hands—its central white panel stripped of the national coat of arms and replaced with Spider-Man logos. Holland and Zendaya held it aloft, beaming, and the crowd erupted. Within hours, social media accounts in Mexico were debating whether the gesture constituted an illegal alteration of a national symbol. The country’s Law on the Coat of Arms, the Flag and the National Anthem empowers the Interior Ministry to impose fines of up to 10,000 times the daily UMA—a sum that could exceed one million pesos—for modifying the flag’s characteristics. Legal observers noted that the absence of the official emblem might place the object in an ambiguous category, but the episode laid bare a tension that global promotional tours often skirt: the collision between a Hollywood franchise’s iconography and the legal sanctity of a nation’s symbols.

That tension, however, was largely absent from the park itself, where the flag was received as a gift of affection, not a provocation. The film at the centre of the evening, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, picks up after the events of No Way Home, with Peter Parker erased from the memories of everyone he loves and fighting crime in a city that no longer knows his name. Holland has described the story as a cautionary tale about solitude, and the theme of a young man struggling to be seen resonated powerfully in a country whose fans have long treated the character as an honorary compatriot. One attendee presented an AI-generated image of herself with Holland and their imagined future children; another carried a portrait of the British actor wearing the Mexican national football team’s jersey. For Destin Daniel Cretton, the director, such gestures were evidence of a passion that “causes laughter and, at other times, great surprise.”

As the rain finally eased and the Ferris wheel continued its slow, web-like rotation, the cast took a last bow and disappeared behind the stage. The altered flag remained, a fleeting object now dissected in legal threads and fan forums alike. In the half-light of the park, the image lingered not of a potential infraction, but of a city that had, for one wet evening, woven a visiting superhero into its own intricate, improbable web.