Spider-Man: Brand New Day – The Biggest Burning Questions

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.

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 (Robert Downey Jr.).

If this is setting up that Spider-Man (Holland, to be clear, not one of the other Peters) is on Battleworld, then how is the Spidey-Tracker still active on Earth, assuming Earth was destroyed? Or perhaps this is merely Spider-Man being taken off Earth in a Life Raft, a vehicle meant to survive the multiversal collapse which eventually lands on Battleworld, moments before Earth is destroyed. Or maybe this is just a fun animated sequence that indicates Spider-Man will be in space next time we see him, and don’t worry about it too much? Either way, we’ll likely know when Spider-Man returns – probably in 2027, though TBA.

Why Wasn’t The Punisher Arrested in the Hospital? (Or When Driving His Punisher-mobile Around?)

Unlike Spider-Man, who is beloved by all of New York, The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) is a murderous vigilante on the run. So why wasn’t he arrested while hanging out in the hospital with Peter – who, we should mention, he also shot? This is, in general, an ongoing question with the character, who isn’t saving people so much as murdering criminals. And as far as we’ve seen in Daredevil: Born Again and The Punisher: One Last Kill, there’s nothing that has particularly cleared his name in any way.

Perhaps one could venture that when Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) murdered all those people in the Born Again Season 2 finale and was exiled from New York, those who were in his semi-legal Red Hook prison were cleared of all crimes. But The Punisher has definitely killed more people after that happened. And while one could accept his secret ship-base is a good hideout, or when he’s in the middle of a pitched tank battle driving his Punisher-mobile – which really should be a car in the shape of a skull, let’s be honest – he can evade the cops… Uh, but what about when he’s sitting in a hospital for a few days? It’s not like he wears a mask (other than when he wears Spider-Man’s mask), so anyone would recognize Frank Castle pretty much the second he stumbled through the doors.

The short answer here is also “don’t worry about it” with a side of maybe they gave him a pass because he was helping Spider-Man (did we mention he was the one who shot him?). But yeah, it strains logic a little bit that one of the biggest mass murderers in New York City history gets to hang out wherever he wants with no repercussions.

Does Ned Really Remember Peter? And if So, Why Doesn’t MJ?

Oh boy. At the end of the movie, Peter sees Ned eating in the corner bodega he frequents, goes over and reintroduces himself as Peter, and they do their little secret handshake. Ned says, “Peter?” and the movie leaves it open as to whether he’s just repeating his name, or the spell has broken and he remembers his best friend.

While this is skirting dangerously close to the nearly impossible to answer question “how does Doctor Strange’s amnesia spell from No Way Home actually work,” based on the plot of the movie it seems likely that Ned does remember Peter, and has his memory back. What are we basing this on? That there’s clearly a natural connection between Peter and Ned that MJ picks up on when they’re all hanging out and playing with LEGOs. That seems to draw a line between Ned and Peter’s relationship, and MJ and Peter’s relationship.

And that gets to the second half of this: if Ned remembers Peter after the secret handshake, why don’t similar interactions cause MJ to remember? The reason, to throw an idea out there, is that MJ has grown, and Ned has not. One of the things that’s clearly explicated through Ned’s TikTok account in the opening montage of the movie is that other than an ill-advised goatee, Ned is pretty much the same. Compare that to MJ, who explains she changed her major at MIT. She’s different, she’s grown, she wants different things. Ned is for better or worse the same guy Peter was friends with all those years ago.

Does that mean MJ can never get her memories back? Jean Grey tells Peter that there are no memories of him at all in her head, but it’s also magical amnesia, something Jean might not be able to sense with her sci-fi telepathy. Chances are MJ can get those memories back, just not right now, in this movie, and not the same way as Ned.

Is MJ Still With Her Boyfriend?

While we check in with a number of characters, we don’t really get any sort of romantic resolution with MJ’s love life – or job life, for that matter. She’s not with Peter because she doesn’t remember him, and based on a conversation she has with him on the Punisher’s ship (why isn’t that shaped like a skull?), she doesn’t love her current boyfriend (played by Eman Esfandi) either. We don’t have an answer for this one because there aren’t any real clues provided. And while we’d like to believe that MJ breaks up with Unnamed Boyfriend #1 after meeting Peter, and gets back together with him, it seems far more likely that’s saved for another movie. Also, is the boyfriend named Paul? Harry Osborn? Dr. Michael Morbius? We’ll never know. Maybe.

How Is Peter Paying for Rent and Buying Food and Flowers and Also All That Equipment?

Here’s the sort of nitpick that makes this movie no fun to think about: how is Spider-Man paying for all of his s**t? Part of this gets back to the amnesia spell, and the fact that Peter Parker effectively does not exist, meaning that there are no records of his name, he has no ID, and there are no pictures of him… Or at least nobody remembers him from those pictures, something MJ and Ned effectively establish when they don’t recognize Peter from high school, know Spider-Man saved them several times, but don’t remember anything else around those events.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Images