Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about to swing into theaters on a thick web of hype, as Marvel fans get set for what some are already touting as the best Spider-Man movie yet. Brand New Day will pick up with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man, years after the events of No Way Home. The world has forgotten Peter, and Spider-Man has become his life; however, when his body and powers start to change in radical ways, Peter seeks help from the likes of Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).
Videos by ComicBook.com
Personal problems don’t stop Spider-Man from being drawn into a conflict that’s bigger than his round-the-clock crimefighting. The Web-Slinger gets approached by the Damage Control agency, and its director, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), to help stop a rogue psychic who can invade minds, as Peter’s Spider-Sense protects him from coercion.
That’s only the barest framework for a story, but it’s enough to connect some other big dots into a working theory about what’s really going on with one of Brand New Day‘s most mysterious characters.
An X-Men Villain Means An X-Men Story
It was big news when Stranger Things star Sadie Sink was cast in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, especially since new information was given about which character she’d be playing in the MCU. The rumors were all over the play (a Mary Jane Watson variant, Peter’s future daughter May “Mayday” Parker, or even more obscure characters like Typhoid Mary). However, there’s been one theory that has loomed largest over the rest, and it is that Sink was playing none other than X-Men’s Jean Grey/Phoenix.
The confirmation that Severance star Tramell Tillman is playing Bill Metzger in the MCU all but confirms that Sadie Sink will be Jean Grey. The character was first introduced in the comic series X-Men: Children of the Atom (1999), which is an updated retelling of the original X-Men team’s origins, and how they came together as a group at Charles Xavier’s school. It went into depth about the teenage lives each X-Men member (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Iceman, and Angel) was living at the time, while an anti-mutant political leader named William Metzger is stirring prejudice and forming a militia group to target and even kill mutants.
A lot of fans now believe that Spider-Man: Brand New Day is doing more to set up the MCU’s “Mutant Saga” arc, rather than trying to fit into the tail end of the “Multiverse Saga”, which is set to end with Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. By doing its own riff on the Children of the Atom origin story, the MCU can effectively take a single Omega-level mutant like Jean Grey, and present why it’s a legitimate threat to humanity to have them running amok unchecked, with no training. By having Tillman play Metzger, it also paints a modern and layered portrait of anl anti-mutant agenda within the US government, what dogma is driving it, and why characters like the X-Men (and MCU mutants in general) are operating as a clandestine paramilitary political group, defending an at risk population
If the rumors prove true, Spider-Man may turn out ot be the perfect ambassador for the MCU Mutant Saga, in a way that not even the comics have considered. We’ll find out when Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits theaters on July 31st.
Forum Conversation: Who do you think Spider-Man: Brand New Day's secret villain is?
Go to ForumThe odds are so much better that Jean Grey is in this movie than that this movie mentions Mayor Fisk even once 🤣
How many times has Marvel taken a minor character and did something completely different with them. Just because he was in one story that centered around the X-Men does not mean that is who he is in this movie, and I do not see Marvel/Disney introducing Jean Grey in a Sony movie. That is just bad business and besides this ties into the whole Mayor Fisk fallout in the MCU proper. So her character will be rooted in Spider-Man lore and not the X-Men. Be patient they will arrive after Doomsday.
It took ten years, but his media training has finally started to work.