Brand New Day Ends With A Big Tease For Avengers: Doomsday — But Not The Way You Think
Who's to say the Spidey tracker can only track one Spider-Man at a time?
Much in the same way that Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame were a two-part culmination ofof a decade of MCU canon up to that point, the back-to-back climax of Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars is about to call forth a whole lot of disparate strands from the last 6 years. The Disney+ series Loki broke time and space by unleashing the Multiverse, creating a massive existential threat in the form of apocalyptic universal collisions named incursions and also serving as the ripple effect driving the larger narrative of the MCU’s aptly titled “Multiverse Saga.” We've been reacquainted with familiar alternate Wall-Crawlers, crowned a new Black Panther and met the Atlanteans, played catch-up with the Fox X-Men universe, and sat down for dinner with the Fantastic Four of a parallel Earth – and somehow Doomsday is going to wrangle all that together in just four months.
Now the recently released Spider-Man: Brand New Day has added even more complications to a multiverse on the brink of catastrophe. The biggest, of course, is the introduction of the X-Men’s Jean Grey, the first member of Xavier’s first class to show up as an Earth-616 (the MCU’s “official” universal designation) native. And while the flashing neon sign saying “the X-Men are here (or maybe not?)” is sure to dominate the conversation surrounding the film, the post-credits scene adds an interesting Doomsday-related wrinkle to the discussion, one that might have less to do with the MCU’s Spidey than it does with one of his alternate variants.
Brand New Day Post-Credits Could Hide a Secret
The introduction of Jean Grey in Brand New Day isn’t the only part of the movie with consequences for the franchise moving forward.
The post-credits scene for Spider-Man: Brand New Day seems kind of low-stakes at first: the Spidey tracker app created by Ned Leeds earlier in the film appears to show Spider-Man far outside of New York and Earth for that matter, somewhere in the vast reaches of space. Naturally, it’s to be taken as an implication that the events of Avengers: Doomsday will send Peter off-world just like in Infinity War, and could even be a hint at his presence on Battleworld, the Frankenstein’s monster planet created by Doctor Doom from the remnants of other universes in the 2015 Secret Wars comic. But maybe it’s worth asking if Ned’s Spidey tracker has the capacity to track Spider-Men from other universes because of their similar genetic makeup.
The first trailer for Doomsday has already made it exceedingly clear that characters from alternate universes such as Fox’s X-Men and the Fantastic Four will be heavily involved in the movie, and if the source material is a blueprint, then they’ll all more than likely be at odds with each other because of the incursions pitting universe against universe. Admittedly, there’s nothing to suggest that either Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire are returning for Doomsday or Secret Wars, but what if one of them is, and the Spidey tracker is actually picking up on their presence encroaching upon the 616 dimension?
Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire were re-introduced as alternate universe Spider-Men in 2021’s No Way Home, and now one of them could be returning just to say goodbye.
The MUC is about to consolidate
Considering that Kevin Feige has already said Secret Wars will mark the return of a streamlined, singular MCU timeline, Doomsday and its sequel might be the last hurrah of numerous pre-MCU Marvel franchises, and it’d be a perfect opportunity to say goodbye to the Sam Raimi Spider-Man era, considering it pretty much birthed the modern superhero boom.
It would also be an incredibly effective way to elevate the stakes; so far we’ve only seen the destruction of the incursions unleashed on random universes as a result of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and What If?, but seeing it happen to a world that people already have pre-existing attachment to would truly sell what a cataclysmic danger our heroes have to contend with. Whether or not Tobey or Andrew will show up in Doomsday or Secret Wars is pure speculation at this point, but what isn’t speculative is the fact that the two-part climax will have lasting consequences not just for Spider-Man, but for every corner of the MCU.
