RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Sadie Sink as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day —Sony
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Brand New Day
The Dark Phoenix will rise again. Probably. Eventually.
A new version of Jean Grey made her debut in Spider-Man: Brand New Day . Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink follows in the footsteps of Famke Janssen and Sophie Turner as the redheaded telepath who is arguably the most powerful mutant in the Marvel comics. But the Jean that Peter Parker ( Tom Holland ) meets is just a lonely teenager who can’t fully control her powers. She presumably won’t learn how until she meets Professor Charles Xavier and the other mutants at his school. Those X-Men are coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a new cast in the iconic roles. It’s just going to take a few more years.
Disney acquired 21st Century Fox way back in 2019, and Marvel fans have been waiting ever since for Magneto, Storm, and Cyclops fighting alongside the Avengers. There have been hints of what is to come: Ms. Marvel carries the X-gene, the fabled marker of a mutant. And the Deadpool & Wolverine movie was the first X-Men movie set inside the MCU. But Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has long promised something more deliberate, a dedicated series of X-Men movies and a “reset” of the stories that came before.
Jean appears to be the first character in that reset, which is confusing because the old versions of various X-Men characters are still here. Ian McKellen's Magneto, Patrick Stewart's Professor X, and James Marsden's Cyclops all turn up in Avengers: Doomsday later this year. Whether they survive it is another question, and the odds don't look good. Here's what Jean's introduction tells us about how Marvel plans to get from one set of X-Men to the other.
Sadie Sink at the premiere of Spider-Man: Brand New Day —Gilbert Flores—Variety via Getty Images
How is Jean Grey introduced in Spider-Man: Brand New Day ?
Jean is the misunderstood villain of the latest Spider-Man movie . She uses mind control to break into the Department of Damage Control, the government body originally created to clear the rubble after the fight in the first Avengers movie and since expanded into something closer to SHIELD, charged with safeguarding the public. Its head, Bill Metzger ( Tramell Tillman ), has a private agenda: he wants to contain superpowered beings and take their abilities. He kidnaps Jean's sister Sarah, also a telepath, and performs experiments on her. Jean tries to save her, but arrives too late.
The movie draws a parallel between Jean Grey and Peter Parker. Both are isolated. Both see their powers evolve. (We even get hints of the destructive emotions in Jean that could eventually manifest in her alter-ego Dark Phoenix.) Peter talks Jean out of killing Metzger and encourages her to find friends who can embrace her for who she is rather than shame her for being different. At the end of the movie, she boards a bus out of New York. Somewhere ahead of her is the found family at Professor X’s school.
For now, Jean is the only future X-Man we know of in Peter's timeline. That distinction matters, because the MCU has spent years establishing that variants of the same hero exist across parallel timelines. Bruce Banner and the Ancient One lay out the branching rules in Avengers: Endgame . Loki built an entire series around the TVA, the bureaucracy tasked with policing different timeline branches. And in Deadpool & Wolverine , Deadpool shops across timelines for a Wolverine variant willing to help him save his universe. The Jean Grey played by Janssen, along with Cyclops (Marsden), Magneto (McKellen), and Storm (Halle Berry), live in one of those other timelines.
Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Brand New Day —Sony Pictures
How do the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day set up an X-Men film?
In Brand New Day , Peter’s actions may set in motion a major conflict between mutants and the government. Peter begins to develop new abilities thanks to a spike in arachnid hormones. At first, he can’t control his new powers; they make him stronger but also more angry. In an effort to return to “normal,” Peter visits Bruce Banner, a.k.a. The Hulk, who has invented a gamma radiation inhibitor to prevent himself from turning into “the big green guy.” Peter suggests that he could adapt the technology to target specific genes, preserving his “good” powers while suppressing the “bad” ones. Banner warns that judging which evolutionary traits are good or bad is an ethical slippery slope.
Nonetheless, Peter builds both an inhibitor calibrated to target his own evolved powers and a universal one, which he uses to defeat Jean Grey. By the end of the film, the Department of Damage Control has its hands on the universal inhibitor. It’s probably not the last we see of it.
A device that can suppress superhuman abilities will likely play a major role in future X-Men films . Mutants, and Magneto in particular, are frequently in conflict with the government over the attempt to eliminate or “normalize” them. While Professor X advocates for finding a way to live harmoniously beside humans, Magneto frequently takes the stance that humans will inevitably target mutants because of their differences. With the inhibitor, Peter may have accidentally seeded a future conflict between whoever this universe’s Magneto turns out to be and Bill Metzger, should Metzger attempt to use this technology to continue to capture, control, experiment on, and eliminate mutants as he does to Sarah.
Already some early fans are comparing Peter’s invention of this universal inhibitor to J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer : The physicist built the atomic bomb and then came to regret it, spending years advocating against nuclear proliferation. By the end of Brand New Day , Peter has accepted his own evolution and come to realize the government had specifically designed weapons to contain him. Once Peter understands how the universal inhibitor could ...
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