By Kotaku | Created at 2026-08-10 15:39:47 | Updated at 2026-08-10 17:24:15
1 hour ago
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has been out for a little under two weeks now, and there has been plenty of theorycrafting dominating the conversation around it, but there have also been debates about whether or not Marvel actually managed to pull off some of the big narrative swings it tried to pull off with the film. Specifically, does the movie actually earn its attempt at redeeming its villain?
Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey, a telepathic mutant that will, presumably, be one of the MCU’s X-Men down the line after Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars. In Brand New Day, she terrorizes New York City, possessing its citizens and going on a violent tirade throughout just about every borough as she repeatedly attacks the Department of Damage Control, throwing unwilling human cannon fodder at the problem. As the movie reaches its climax, we learn that Jean did all this while searching for her sister, who had been kidnapped and subsequently killed via experimentation by Damage Control. In one fell swoop, everything Jean has done is justified. At least, that’s how the movie positions this.
Broadly speaking, yes, Jean is a victim seeking her sister, and after Spider-Man manages to de-escalate the situation, she doesn’t simply re-integrate into society and immediately become a hero in the eyes of the public. She and Peter do part on good terms, at least. Which is a far cry from the sentiment between them when she puppeted MJ’s body in an “unforgivable” attempt to manipulate him earlier in the film.
While Peter may find it in his heart to empathize with her, she impacted the lives of far more people than just Spider-Man, MJ, and the people of Damage Control. Several NYC citizens were possessed, affected by her psychic blast that enveloped a chunk of the city, or otherwise left injured in the aftermath. A lot of this you can chalk up to collateral damage. Jean is doing what she has to in order to find her sister, and she hasn’t done anything out of malice, right? Well…there is one guy that fans are specifically pointing to who has muddied the narrative.
Just before Jean is properly unveiled as the villain of Brand New Day, she makes a show of her telepathic abilities by possessing several people walking through the city to toy with Spidey, revealing that she knows his true identity and is going after MJ. In this scene, she aurafarms and possesses multiple people just walking by Peter to demonstrate her power before she starts a psychic chase scene across the city. One of the poor souls she inhabits is an older man who was just doing his job, seemingly in some kind of construction based on the reflective vest he’s wearing. Jean doesn’t know this man, but she walks him into oncoming traffic. Rather than letting him go so he has a moment to get out of the way, he’s hit by a taxi.
In the grand scheme of the Marvel universe, characters have been redeemed after doing far worse, comparatively. Look at Loki, who contributed to the near-apocalyptic efforts of Thanos in the first Avengers movie. Now, my guy has had his own TV show and seems primed to be a hero for the foreseeable future. Plenty of Marvel heroes have killed people, but it’s usually been wrongdoers and villains. Jean walked an innocent man in front of a car just to let Peter know she means business.
“The Jean Grey at the beginning of the movie straight up is not the same character as the one at the end,” a fan writes in a character breakdown on Reddit. “The Jean Grey at the beginning is basically an irredeemable sadist who delights in causing pain and suffering and the character at the end is a tragic victim who is only doing what she does out of desperation to find her lost sister. […] But it goes deeper than that, to actual sadism, when she starts targeting Peter. She decides to threaten MJ to force him to help her and in the process casually kills a random civilian she was possessing by forcing him to stand in front of a moving car. In movies the villain casually taking a life with cold disinterest or even gleeful amusement is meant to signify to the audience how terrible they are and how little they value human life. So Jean doing that is a massive transgression and one that never gets answered for, as it’s just forgotten.”
Some are making the argument that this is CinemaSins-style nitpicking at a scene that is more about setting the tone for the movie’s central conflict than anything else, but the MCU has had entire movies like Captain America: Civil War that comment on how superhero movies often treat the ordinary people that heroes are saving as more of an abstract concept than as real people with names, faces, families, and so forth. You can’t just dismiss the moral dimensions of what Jean does in these moments because they serve to establish the movie’s stakes; they also tell us about who she is as a character, and what lines she’s willing to cross.
We’ll see if Jean faces significant consequences in a future appearance. Right now, Sink is set to reprise the role in Avengers: Secret Wars, and the new X-Men movie at some point after. Heartstopper actor Kit Connor will join Sink in the film, as he is set to play Cyclops, who has historically been Jean’s love interest in most X-Men media.
