There was a danger that Spider-Man: Brand New Day might amount to little more than a palate cleanser between the multiversal excesses of No Way Home and the all-star chaos of Avengers: Doomsday. Why not just keep it small: a more grounded tale of New York crime-fighting, to keep the Marvel machine rolling before the inevitable return of world-ending stakes? Instead, the studio, once again in partnership with Spider-Man rights holder Sony, has produced a gamechanging comic book epic whose effects will continue being felt for years to come.
The film’s biggest twist is significant enough on its own, but Brand New Day keeps widening the implications long after the initial shock has started to wear off. Characters who seemed to exist for one purpose gradually reveal another. Throwaway conversations acquire unexpected significance. New gadgets, strange abilities and apparently routine subplots all hint at much broader shifts taking place beneath the familiar web-slinging adventure. By the time the credits have rolled, the film has answered some longstanding questions, raised several more, and left audiences with a surprisingly clear idea of where the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) could be heading next.
So if you walked out of the cinema this weekend wondering why certain revelations felt so important, what some seemingly innocuous scenes were really setting up, or whether one particular post-credit tease might have enormous implications for the years ahead, here is what the film may have been trying to tell us.
Something very strange is happening to Spider-Man
The Peter Parker we re-encounter at the beginning of Brand New Day is in a bad place. Yes, he has locked up enough New York City supervillains to recreate the Sinister Six several times over, but he lives a lonely existence without his dear departed Aunt May, his girlfriend MJ or his best friend, Ned, and the last two don’t even remember who he is thanks to Doctor Strange’s spell at the tail end of No Way Home. As if loneliness weren’t awful enough, Spidey also finds himself struggling to control strange new powers: the organic web shooters could be useful if they can be controlled but the hypersensitive Spider-sense is a problem, while all that extra arachnid aggression only serves to increase the chances of our friendly neighbourhood hero accidentally taking down innocent bystanders. The question remains whether the hero really is falling apart or just evolving into something new.
A Jean Grey for the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Just when Spidey is at his weakest, he is faced with an antagonist whose powers far outstrip those of the street-level crims he has been swatting away. At first, Sadie Sink appears to be portraying a common-or-garden body-swapping baddie who is out to hurt MJ if Parker doesn’t do what she says. But it quickly emerges, in one of the most significant moments in the series, that this is the MCU’s version of Jean Grey, a telepath with extraordinary powers whose presence means we are now firmly in the Marvel mutant era.
Damage Control is not what it was
Introduced in Spider-Man: Homecoming as a sort of handy clean-up gang who zoom in to put everything back in its rightful place after Loki and his mates have smashed up another cityscape, the Department of Damage Control initially looks like just another one of Spider-Man’s allies in the battle against supervillain chaos. Yet it soon emerges that something more sinister is going on. All Jean wants is to rescue her sister Sara, who is being held against her will at the organisation’s secret complex – or at least she was, until scientists killed her while trying to learn how her telepathic powers worked. Led by Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), this new take on Damage Control seems to be transforming into the MCU’s version of the comic books’ Mutant Response Division. Then the younger Grey is trapped at the complex, effectively taking her dead sister’s place.
Did Peter Parker just invent the mutant restraint collar?
Here we need to roll the plot back a little, to the chapter in which Peter approaches Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner – now happily teaching at Empire State University and sporting a decidedly less green complexion – to ask how he has managed to stop transforming into the Hulk and flattening half of Manhattan every five minutes. It turns out he has been using an inhibitor chip, whose underlying technology Peter realises could also help stabilise his own increasingly erratic mutation. Being a scientific genius in his own right, Parker builds his own version (with the help of MJ), taming those organic web-shooters, dialling back the hair-trigger aggression and regaining control of his wayward powers.
Only later does the breakthrough acquire much darker significance. Peter adapts Banner’s technology into a universal inhibitor and uses a second chip to suppress Jean’s abilities during their confrontation at Damage Control. Jean ultimately overwhelms the device but its broken remains are left behind. What looked like a powerful tool against unwanted mutation could therefore become something akin to the power-dampening restraints that have long haunted the X-Men comics. Peter has probably solved his own problem – in fact, by the end of the movie, he decides he doesn’t even need the chip – but may also have invented the MCU’s first truly effective anti-mutant weapon.
How many X-Men are already out there?
The question now is whether the MCU has its own (presumably youthful) versions of Charles Xavier, Wolverine and Cyclops waiting in the wings, or whether we won’t get to see them until the original 20th Century Fox-era versions have yet another swansong in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday. The New Avengers’ Yelena Belova, who spends much of Brand New Day sitting in a Russian bathhouse on Zoom, later begins decoding Damage Control’s redacted files, suggesting that the conspiracy may stretch beyond what Peter and Jean have uncovered. We no longer need ask whether mutants exist in the MCU, but rather how many the bad guys already know about, and what else Metzger has been doing to them.
Ned, MJ and getting the old gang back together
It was inevitable Peter would reacquaint himself with the two people who matter most to him, even if neither initially has the faintest idea why the nervous young man hovering at the edge of their lives seems so familiar. The trio’s gradual reconnection risks softening the wonderfully bleak ending of No Way Home, in which Parker chose to keep his friends safe and ignorant rather than risk putting them in the sort of danger that eventually killed Aunt May. But Brand New Day does not simply reverse Doctor Strange’s spell, or restore the previous status quo at the flick of a mystical switch. Instead, it suggests Peter may have to earn his comrades’ friendship all over again. Spidey is not quite getting the old gang back together – he is being offered the much more awkward prospect of meeting them for the first time again.
Exactly which Spider-Man did the Spider-tracker find?
One of Brand New Day’s most amusing conceits is Ned’s 8-bit-style Spidey-tracker, which seems to be able to pinpoint the location of the nearest wall crawler with remarkable accuracy. It is never made particularly clear how it works, but the film’s post-credit scene suggests that the faux retro tech might have a more potent long-term use than just helping Peter’s best friend keep tabs on him. It appears to detect a Spider-Man beyond Earth’s atmosphere, raising the obvious question of which version of Spider-Man is out in the cosmos.
Given that the post-credits scene of Thunderbolts* showed the Fantastic Four’s rocket ship heading towards the MCU version of Earth, the temptation is to imagine an alternate-reality version of Spidey entering the solar system just in time to play a pivotal role in Avengers: Doomsday. The problem is that there are so many possible candidates: Tobey Maguire Spidey; Andrew Garfield Spidey; Miles Morales; Spider-Noir; Spider-Gwen; or perhaps even that weird little Spider-pig from the animated films. Then again, maybe Ned’s machine is simply on the blink after he spilled one too many caffeine drinks on it.
