RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Spoilers follow for Spider-Man: Brand New Day .
Is your Spider-Sense tingling? If so, it may be less of a Peter Tingle, and more of a burning sensation, as Spider-Man: Brand New Day is on fire with a lot of dangling plot points that need addressing.
Sure, the movie finishes up this leg of Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) emotional journey in a satisfying manner, and concludes his battle with the not-so-villainous Jean Elaine Grey (Sadie Sink). But there are still bad guys out there, good guys in new situations, and end credits scenes that are, let’s be honest, potentially extremely confusing.
With that in mind, let’s lay out some of the biggest burning questions we have after Spider-Man: Brand New Day, as well as some of the smallest, and see how well we can do in also answering them.
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Where Is Jean Grey Going?
After the confrontation at the Damage Control facility, Jean Grey is (somehow) not arrested for Thought Crimes perpetrated on the city of New York, but rather is headed out of town on a bus. Where’s she going? Well, the reported answer is Avengers: Secret Wars , which likely takes place on a patchwork planet called Battleworld (more on that later). So in terms of her bus ride, at least immediately, she’s not going anywhere.
However, it’s hard to see a bus heading out of New York City and into woodsy, possibly upstate Fall foliage and not think she’s headed to Westchester, home of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. To be clear, we don’t know whether there is an Xavier’s school in the MCU, or if it’s in Westchester, or if when director Jake Schreier’s in-development X-Men movie picks up Jean will still be on the bus, or somewhere else entirely. But in the lore of the Marvel Comics, Jean is Professor X’s first student… So wherever the MCU lands with Marvel’s Merry Mutants, the implication at the end of the movie is clear: Jean is headed towards her destiny with the X-Men. Whenever and wherever that may be.
Did Spider-Man Accidentally Create Mutant Inhibitors?
While we’re talking X-Men, there’s a very big plot point that could potentially be used in the upcoming X-Men reboot movie from Brand New Day: Mutant Inhibitors. Spider-Man spends most of the movie wrestling with his surging arachnid DNA, and how to suppress it. Thanks to some coaching by Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), aka the Hulk, he hits on the idea of an inhibitor chip, which he successfully uses on himself – as well as to suppress Jean’s telepathic powers entirely.
However, both Bruce and MJ (Zendaya) warn him that this technology is extremely dangerous, and potentially suppressing something that needs to be expressed. MJ is more concerned about Peter; but Bruce’s warning is about the ramifications of unleashing technology that can suppress any powers in a world already on edge about the idea of super-powered individuals.
While there have been plenty of riffs about this type of technology throughout the decades, it’s impossible to hear this in a movie that brings mutants into the MCU (ignoring the events of Ms. Marvel and The Marvels, as well as Avengers: Doomsday for the moment) without thinking Spider-Man’s tech, which ends up in the hands of Damage Control, could be used on the burgeoning mutant menace.
It's very likely Peter Parker is responsible for something that will become a bane to mutant-kind. Normally in the Marvel Comics it takes the form of Inhibitor Collars, placed around a mutant’s neck. Here, it’s a chip, though Damage Control needs to keep it connected to a power source to keep it going. Point being, there’s probably some refinement there before it pops up in an X-Men movie… But yes, very likely Peter Parker is responsible for something that will become a bane to mutant-kind.
What Happened to William Metzger?
Riffing off the previous point, the actual bad guy of the movie, William Metzger (Tramell Tillman) is in the wind at the end of the movie. While Bill Metzger was a minor antagonist in the comics, it’s pretty clear here that his philosophy of preventing damage through Damage Control by rounding up super-powered beings can be extended very specifically to mutants in an X-Men movie, or movies.
There are plenty of characters who fit this bill in X-Men comics, TV shows, and movies; from William Stryker and Henry Gyrich to Graydon Creed and beyond. So Metzger is far from out of place in a (potential) franchise that features mutant haters who either want to use, abuse, or eliminate the X-gene entirely. Whether we’ll see him as the main villain of an X-Men movie or merely another threat in the background is, of course, TBD. But Jean and her future teammates are likely far from done with Metzger yet.
Where Is Spider-Man in the End-Credits Scene, and Does It Make Any Sense?
While there’s no mid-credits scene, there is a Spider-Man: Brand New Day post-credits scene and it’s, uh, a potentially confusing one. In it, we get an animated shot of Ned’s (Jacob Batalon) Spidey-Tracker app, which is searching for Spider-Man’s location. We hear the app say “location unknown” a few times as it zooms out, then moves away from Earth, and says, “location found” with a little Spider-Man avatar floating in space. This is followed by the white on black words “Spider-Man Will Return,” though it does not add “in Avengers: Doomsday” or “At a Russian Bathhouse.”
The basic interpretation here is that Spider-Man is off-planet, in space. The longer interpretation, or the smallest leap is that this is showing Spider-Man during the events of Secret Wars on Battleworld. The part of this that is potentially confusing, if correct, is that the assumption is we’re following the rough plot of writer Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars comic book, which finds the multiverse destroyed and the remains coalesced into one patchwork planet called Battleworld, ruled by Doctor Doom (...
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