Spider-Man: Brand New Day still hasn’t revealed who Sadie Sink is playing, but the new trailer very arguably strengthens the argument that she’s been cast as the MCU’s new Jean Grey. With a confirmed X-Men reboot on the way to finally relieve Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and company of their duties, it would make sense that Marvel is preparing for the future with a fresh team of mutants. If Sink is set to make her debut as one of the most powerful X-Men of all time, she’s set to do so in a way that the franchise has never attempted.
Jean Grey made her first-ever appearance in 1963. She was one of the founding members of the team in the X-Men #1 comic. She originally had the alias of Marvel Girl, although that title has since been dispensed with. Instead, she’s more commonly referred to as Phoenix when she’s in superhero mode. In times when she has transitioned into being a villain rather than a hero, she’s adopted other monikers. The most widely known is Dark Phoenix, but she was also briefly known as the Black Queen when telepathically manipulated into becoming part of the Hellfire Club (Stranger Things, much?) by Mastermind in a 1980 Uncanny X-Men comic book. All of these avenues remain open to Sink’s Jean Grey, if that is indeed who the actress is playing in Brand New Day. However, the upcoming movie could be speeding things along.
‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Would Be the First Time Jean Grey Has Been Introduced as a Villain
Again, it’s important to remember that Sink’s Brand New Day character hasn’t been officially confirmed. It does seem very much like Jean Grey is still in the running, though. If that is who Sink has been cast as, then the movie is a massive outlier when it comes to how Marvel traditionally uses the iconic mutant. The potential new version of Jean Grey in the upcoming Spider-Man movie looks positioned as one of the biggest villains in the story. She appears to be taking over people’s minds and just generally terrorizing New York. This sort of villainy wouldn’t be anything new for Jean, but Brand New Day looks to be taking a shortcut.
There has always been a road to seeing Jean slip into a darker version of herself. Whether she’s in comics, in animated form, or in a live-action project, the idea of her becoming corrupted and misusing her powers is a common twist. The thing is, it never happens right as we meet a new version of the character. Instead, that transformation is something that usually serves as a major turning point at a later time in the story being told. If Sink is playing Jean Grey, and she’s deep in the throes of villainy (whether willingly or otherwise), then that would be a huge creative choice when weighed up against the Marvel franchise’s history.
Why It’s Probably Time for Marvel To Introduce a Version of Jean Grey as a Villain
Marvel has existed as a company for so long, and its characters have been reinvented so many times, that it’s tricky to find pre-existing fans who don’t know all the heroes and villains like the backs of their hands. In fact, even those who don’t follow Marvel have passively harvested a lot of the lore from its being so ingrained in popular culture. For instance, Spider-Man variants almost always have the same origin story, and it can get pretty dull seeing and hearing it over and over again with each reboot. The MCU adapted to that by skipping over it for Tom Holland’s version of the web-slinger. The formative moment of his being bitten by a radioactive spider has only ever been mentioned, and never shown.
Something very similar could be said about Jean Grey. It’s pretty much a given at this point that any version of the character will eventually become a threat to her former allies. The nature and origin of the threat isn’t always the same, but it’s enough to make fans just wait impatiently for that twist to arrive. So, why shouldn’t the MCU skip ahead to what is probably the most exciting part of Jean Grey’s arc? By doing so, Jean becomes a villain to be redeemed, rather than a hero to be restored. It can also be generally accepted (and probably canonically established) that her life before the villainy was roughly the same as it was in previous X-Men stories, but it takes on a different meaning if we don’t see all that in advance. It would be a really cool and logical way for Spider-Man: Brand New Day to adapt the character.
- Release Date
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July 31, 2026
- Runtime
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150 Minutes
- Director
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Destin Daniel Cretton
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
