After Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Holland Starred In One Of Apple TV's Biggest Flops

• Television
• Drama Shows

Tom Holland is riding high in 2026. Not only did he star in one of the biggest movies of the year with Christopher Nolan's massive epic "The Odyssey," he also set an unbelievable box office record with "Spider-Man: Brand New Day." It's a heck of a run for the British star, who has otherwise struggled for a hit outside of his exploits as Spidey. After 2021's "Spider-Man: No Way Home" became the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time, it looked as though his fortunes might change. But a series of lackluster projects followed, including Apple TV's "The Crowded Room."

This thriller miniseries starred Holland as Danny Sullivan, a man who's arrested for firing a gun into a crowd in New York City in 1979. Through conversations with a professor named Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), we learn how Sullivan wound up in such an unfortunate situation. 

The whole thing is based on Daniel Keyes' 1981 non-fiction novel "The Minds of Billy Milligan," which chronicled the life, crimes, and court case of its titular subject. After committing multiple felonies, including armed robbery and the rape of three women in and around the Ohio State University campus, Milligan became the first person acquitted of a major crime for having dissociative identity disorder. "The Crowded Room" takes some liberties in its retelling of that story, most notably changing the name of the main character. Otherwise, it does its best to adapt "The Minds of Billy Milligan" and the events on which that book is based across 10 episodes. According to most critics, however, the story didn't need anything like that many installments. In fact, forcing 10 episodes ultimately resulted in an overlong and messy series that remains one of Holland's biggest post-"No Way Home" missteps.

The Crowded Room was supposed to be a Tom Holland triumph

Tom Holland's best performance arguably came four years before his "Spider-Man" debut in J. A. Bayona's disaster drama "The Impossible." Since then, the actor has only seen significant success as Spidey. Four of Holland's best films according to Rotten Tomatoes are Marvel Cinematic Universe projects, and his other work has been uneven at best. The bloated mess that was "Cherry," for example, was a disappointing Apple TV debut, and his second go round with the streamer wasn't much better.

As well as starring, Holland produced "The Crowded Room," and no doubt felt that its serious subject matter would make for a critical triumph with serious awards potential. After all, the show was created by Akiva Goldsman, who won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2001's "A Beautiful Mind" and has successfully adapted Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" books (though this is also the man responsible for writing "Batman & Robin"). Unfortunately, Goldsman and Holland's miniseries not only failed to garner much attention upon its 2023 release, it was savaged by critics who found the show to be overlong and tiresome.

In "The Crowded Room," the story unfolds via flashbacks, with Holland's Danny Sullivan retelling his life story in conversations with Amanda Seyfried's specialist Rya Goodman. Sullivan's interlocutor takes a deep interest in his experiences, encouraging him to dig deep in order to uncover some sort of explanation for his crimes beyond the police's serial killer theory. As things play out, we learn how Sullivan grew up and what led to the NYC shooting, before the show becomes a courtroom drama in its final few episodes. For many critics, it was a bit of a mess, though several actually seemed to like Holland as a mentally-troubled criminal.

Most critics dismissed Tom Holland's The Crowded Room

Holland likely hoped "The Crowded Room" would be the show that finally proved his dramatic worth. But a 33% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes quickly dashed those hopes.

Writing for CNN, Brian Lowry criticized the "bleak gimmickry" of the show, and thought that Danny Sullivan was a "showy role for Holland" that ultimately failed to take advantage of "his boyish likability and charisma." Similarly, /Film's own Marshall Shaffer thought "The Crowded Room" miscast Holland and Amanda Seyfried, noting how the former had seemingly mistaken "trauma for drama." Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times was also unimpressed overall, even while he found much to like in the series. "The performances are good; the production values are high; the dialogue is well-written," he wrote, before ultimately concluding: "Some things make enough sense for one of Goldsman's Dan Brown adaptations, but not really enough for a series that wants to engage in real-world problems and pathologies." Like many of his peers, Lloyd criticized the length of the series, which in his opinion was "padded with extraneous material" and "scenes that run longer than necessary."

That said, a few critics liked the show. The Boston Globe's Matthew Gilbert called the series "a heartfelt portrait of mental illness from an array of viewpoints," and "10 episodes of haunting shadows and, perhaps, in the corners of the story, cracks of light." Holland's dramatic talents have never really been in question. It's not that he can't do drama, it's that he has never really found the right venue for his those abilities, and "The Crowded Room" was yet another mistake in that regard. Now, having conquered the box office and won over critics with "The Odyssey" and "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," things might be changing.