How ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Spins Up Years of Marvel Storylines to Come

Major, major spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day below. You’ve been warned.The mighty Marvel machine is revving back up. Hot on the heels of a splashy Comic-Con panel and a new Avengers: Doomsday trailer comes Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the first Tom Holland Spider-Man movie in five years.This being GQ, we’ll start this rundown with a note on the Spider-fit: After years of nano-techy armor-style suits, Peter’s back in a woven, minimalist Spider-suit reminiscent of the costumes worn by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in earlier Spidey movies. It’s a look befitting director Destin Daniel Cretton’s film, an expansive Spider-Man story that takes a more back-to-basics approach to the character. As GQ’s Frazier Tharpe put it in Tap In this week, it’s the first time Tom Holland’s typically-chipper Peter Parker has resembled “the Peter we know and love: broke, lovesick, down on his luck, mourning a parental figure, with great responsibility and zero hoes.”Peter and MJ’s relationship takes center stage in this version, which makes the most of the chemistry between Holland and Zendaya; Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is a legitimately fun addition to the screen-Spidey mythos. And while it pays off exactly as most people assumed it would, there’s also a mystery here involving a new character played by Sadie Sink, plus the requisite post-credits sequence seeding MCU plotlines to come, in Avengers: Doomsday and beyond.If you’re wondering what this all means for the larger Marvel Master Plot, we’ve got you covered with this spoiler-packed breakdown.Yes, Sadie Sink is Jean GreyEven before Steve Lacy blurted it out on the red carpet—we salute an embargo-violating king—Sink’s role was perhaps the worst-kept casting secret since Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. But now it’s official: Around the halfway point of Brand New Day, we find out the Stranger Things star is playing the one and only Jean Grey. Her version is the third cinematic iteration of the famous/infamous Jean, a character played in the Fox X-Men films by Famke Janssen and, later, Sophie Turner.Jean’s abilities in Brand New Day are mostly centered around mind control; as seen in the trailer, she’s able to telepathically jump into other people’s bodies and manipulate them. It’s established in the film that this only works on subjects inside a 33-foot-radius, but that seems like a temporary cap on her abilities—in the comics, after all, Jean is classified as an Omega-level mutant, which is as high as the scale goes. She’s also the central character of the classic X-Men storyline known as the Phoenix Saga, in which Jean becomes host to an all-powerful (and eventually corrupting) cosmic entity. Since we’ve seen that storyline adapted twice on the big screen already—in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand and 2019’s Dark Phoenix—here’s hoping Kevin Feige isn’t planning to go back to that well anytime soon, if at all.Brand New Day’s version of Jean is set up as the villain throughout most of the film, thanks to a lie that Department of Damage Control (DODC) head Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) spins to win Spider-Man to his side. Jean’s after Metzger because he kidnapped her sister Sara to leverage her mind control powers for nefarious means, but repents after Spider-Man saves her. The last time we see Sink’s Jean, she’s leaving New York on a bus headed for upstate New York, canonical location of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, headquarters of the X-Men. But Brand New Day makes it very clear she’s operating alone in the wake of her parents ditching both her and Sara over their respective powers and is otherwise a loner until she and Spider-Man become friendly.It’s worth mentioning that despite Deadpool, Wolverine, and other X-Men team members appearing in this December’s Avengers: Doomsday, Sink’s Jean is the first legacy X-Men character to be recast in the MCU. However, she’s not the MCU’s first official mutant—that distinction belongs to Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), who finds out at the end of her eponymous series that she has mutant abilities. That point is driven home by the inclusion of the X-Men ‘97 guitar riff, which leaves no doubt about the MCU’s intentions for the character.With Jean officially on the board, it’s likely audiences will learn more about the official cast for the MCU’s new franchise reboot shortly. Directed by Thunderbolts* helmer Jake Schreier and written by Lee Sung Jin (Beef) & Joanna Calo (The Bear), the new MCU X-Men cast was suspiciously absent from Marvel’s latest batch of announcements at Comic-Con over the weekend. Now, with Sink’s identity out in the open, we’ll likely get a full reveal of the cast at Disney’s D23 fan event and expo, which takes place August 14-16. Nothing’s official at this point, except that Cooper Hoffman won’t be playing Cyclops, despite rumors to the contrary; names still being tossed around in connection with the project include Cailee Spaeny for Rogue, Charles Melton for Beast, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister.Finally, Sink is reportedly also set to appear in Avengers: Secret Wars, which brings us to our next point...A Secret Post-Credits SceneOne of the best running gags throughout Brand New Day is the location tracking app that Ned (Jacob Batalon) sets up to follow Spider-Man. After the credits roll, the film resumes with the device's 16-bit interface, revealing that Spider-Man’s location has shifted from Earth to somewhere in outer space.This isn’t Spidey’s first galactic adventure, as he stole away on a spaceship with Doctor Strange and Iron Man in Avengers: Infinity War. But what is different about this instance is that his location appears to be floating in space somewhere.Based on the fact Holland isn’t included as one of the (many) chairs in Doomsday, pending a post-credits cameo, it’s safe to assume this is likely more of a teaser for Doomsday’s follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars. As a reminder, in Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić’s epic event, the Marvel heroes are stuck in a patchwork reality created in the aftermath of an incursion event, aka a collision between two different universes. How Earth still exists in the aftermath of an incursion, and why only Spider-Man was seemingly teleported into space, remain mysteries for now.There was no way that one of Marvel’s biggest heroes would sit out an Avengers-level event, but this teaser, down to the inclusion of a “Spider-Man Will Return” title card, signals he’ll be back in the mix to help save the day sooner rather than later.