Destin Daniel Cretton

The distance between Short Term 12 and a Spider-Man film is enormous, and Destin Daniel Cretton has covered it in about a decade. Born in Haiku, Hawaii, in 1978, he made his name in 2013 with a small film set in a residential facility for at risk teenagers, shot for very little money, and it remains one of the best American films of its decade. The reason is restraint: nobody in it makes a speech, the emotional turns are underplayed almost to the point of being missed, and the young cast is directed to behave rather than to perform.

Two memoir adaptations followed. The Glass Castle is the weakest thing he has made, smoothing down exactly the material that made the book difficult, and it suffers from the compression that biographical films inflict on messy lives. Just Mercy is much better and much more conventional, a legal drama that trusts its own facts and does not push the audience where it wants them.

Then Marvel. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in 2021 contains the best hand to hand fighting the studio has staged, particularly in its first half, where Cretton's interest in bodies in small spaces translates directly into action filmmaking. The final act turns into computer generated creatures colliding in the sky, which is where the studio's grammar takes over from his.

He now has Wonder Man as a television series and Spider-Man: Brand New Day as a feature, both arriving in 2026. Whether the intimacy that made his first film work can survive inside a franchise that size is the only genuinely interesting question about the next few years.