Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Marvel

After leaking pretty widely a little while back, Disney has stopped taking its sweet time and released a new Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer ahead of its July 31 release date. It’s another look at the rather expansive cast of heroes, and its mysterious villain.

Things we learned or know for sure now:

• Peter is undergoing full Man-Spider mutation, and here we see him blast off his mechanical web-slingers in favor of organic ones, and it seems to put him in potential “berserk” mode as we see in his Scorpion fight, not bothering to avoid slamming on a passing police car.
• We saw previously that Frank Castle, The Punisher, was in a chase sequence where he and Spidey were battling over the same target, but unlike previous guesses, it seems he’s a more key part of the story than initially suggested, some place he goes when Peter has nowhere else to turn, and MJ has to talk him into helping with…whatever is going on.
• Bruce Banner is sought out to help with Peter’s mutation problems, but here we have our first full look at the actual brawl between the return of Savage Hulk and Spider-Man, with Pete being sonic clapped out of a building. This is not some sort of Hulk vendetta; we see him being controlled by…whoever the villain is here.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been described as a “detective story” to figure out who the villain is, which is why she, a character played by Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink, has not been fully revealed in any trailers or marketing, even as she’s showing up for press calls now.

There are few theories that make any amount of sense now, past the one, inescapable conclusion: somehow, Sadie Sink is playing X-Man Jean Grey, clearly before her time on that team.

No other options make sense given how expansive her psychic abilities are, from controlling individual people, including Avengers like The Hulk, and freezing everyone in place, which is Jean Grey/Professor X level power. Go down the list of other Spider-villains, and there is just no psychic-type villain that makes sense (it sure isn’t Madame Web) or who Marvel would want leading a billion-dollar movie. But that raises the question: Why have they made Jean Grey, of all people, the villain in a Spider-Man movie?

Jean Grey and Spider-Man have practically no meaningful connections in Marvel history, friend or foe. There are very brief periods where they’ve interacted or bonded, at one point over both having clones, but that’s it. Nothing even close to this has happened before, not that the MCU is always adapting comic storylines, of course.

We know that Marvel is about to introduce the X-Men as of this next post-Doomsday phase, and another point of evidence is that this is a young, red-haired, incredibly psychically powerful woman which I mean, come on. Marvel has said that the new X-Men will be different than past iterations, as it is obviously not the best move to recreate First Class, and that could include something like say, a young Jean Grey going nuts when she gets her powers before being brought down to earth and starting her hero era. And uh, Spider-Man helping, I guess. Guess we’ll find out in a month and a half.

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