Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s Mutant Twist Is A Waste Of A Solid Origin Story
Marvel’s obsession with secrecy hurts Brand New Day (and its mysterious villain) more than it helps.
Derided as Marvel’s Cinematic Universe might be now, we’ve all fallen prey to the franchise’s most manipulative tactic: the surprise reveal designed to make us scream for joy. In professional wrestling, they call it “the pop,” and Marvel has spent the past half-decade chasing it. It’s not a trivial pursuit — if there’s a reason why Avengers: Endgame is so remembered, it’s because it’s a film filled to the brim with scream-inducing reveals. That makes for a great experience in a crowded theater, but a film can totally lose its punch once removed from that environment.
Think Andrew Garfield’s return to the Spider-Man world in No Way Home. When that reveal played in theaters, crowds understandably went wild. But when the movie premiered on demand, it was impossible to ignore the seconds of silence built into the film to accommodate applause, gasps, and shouts of recognition. It made No Way Home feel much more stilted and cloying in hindsight, and it’s a shame that Marvel hasn’t learned a lesson from that. Tom Holland’s fourth solo outing as Spider-Man, in this year’s Brand New Day, even takes it all a step further, borrowing another tactic from the 2010s to introduce its villain, played by Sadie Sink.
Spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Brand New Day falls prey to one of Marvel’s worst instincts.
It’s a brand new day for Peter Parker (Tom Holland) in his latest big-screen adventure, but the story around him can feel frustratingly retrograde in some respects. Brand New Day’s treatment of Sink’s mysterious villain might be its biggest misstep: her existence sets the stage for a future appearance from the X-Men, but the secrecy surrounding her true role also destroys the momentum that Brand New Day builds up in its first half.
Brand New Day has the same problem as something like Star Trek Into Darkness, which turned a compelling story into a mystery box for its villain, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Paramount hedged Into Darkness’ marketing on this very mystery, but the reveal that Cumberbatch was, in fact, a new incarnation of Khan fell pretty flat within the movie itself. Ditto for the villain reveal in Brand New Day, which takes its sweet time identifying Sink’s anonymous telepath as Jean Grey, a complicated heroine long linked to the X-Men. The reveal marks the film’s halfway point: it’s Brand New Day’s most concerted attempt to get a pop out of the audience, and it’s also where it grinds to a halt.
Jean effectively becomes the second star of Brand New Day, with the story’s focus shifting to bring us up to speed. We get an extended flashback that also serves as her villain origin, and spend even more time with her as she becomes a guinea pig for the Department of Damage Control. It’s not a terrible origin for the character, even if it does repeat misguided beats from other Marvel films — from Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) origins in Avengers: Age of Ultron to the rise of Sentry (Lewis Pullman) in Thunderbolts — and subverts myriad expectations for Jean. In any other context, it’d be effective: it would have been a great cold open in a film that wasn’t so adamant about preserving a secret. Planted smack in the middle of what should be a more Peter-focused story, however, it all feels way too convoluted to work.
Jean Grey’s very existence in the MCU should never have been a secret.
Marvel has long loved maintaining a mystery in its upcoming films, but that formula can’t work with every story it wants to tell. Brand New Day nearly buckles under its obligations to the MCU, which turns a Spider-Man adventure into a backdoor pilot for the X-Men. It’s also hurt by the need to keep Jean’s existence a secret. It doesn’t help that, like the Spidey films before it, her identity was leaked long before Brand New Day premiered. Whether that leak spread to those tuned into the rumor mill, or general audiences just don’t know who Jean Grey is, her reveal lacked any tension or excitement when it played out in theaters.
The fact that Jean is in this film at all shouldn’t have been a surprise to begin with. Instead, Marvel could have withheld the ways that Brand New Day alters her origins. That the film molds her into a villain we later end up rooting for is a much more effective surprise than her character’s outright existence in the MCU. It’s still a frustrating pivot, one that starts the X-Men’s tenure in this universe off on a very strange foot — but at least then Peter’s story wouldn’t have to be hijacked for the sake of Jean’s own accelerated development.
