Okay, Let’s Talk about Sadie Sink’s Character in ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’
Spoilers, obviously.
[Marvel and Sony have endeavored to hide who Sadie Sink is playing in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. They even did a little video about it. Since the movie is now in theaters, I wanted to write about her character and why I think it’s the film’s biggest weakness despite Sink’s performance.
Last warning: SPOILERS AHEAD]
Intense secrecy is nothing new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The studio likes their reveals, although some of their best have been when they intimated that a character was one way before going in a completely different direction. But for their latest, they’ve endeavored to keep a heavy lid on the identity of the film’s villain. Some fans theorized that the character, who appeared to be a telepath from the trailer, was Jean Grey. Jean Grey is a telepath, and Marvel wouldn't say who red-headed actor Sadie Sink was playing. Telepath + red-headed actor = famous X-Men mutant. I thought it couldn’t be that simple.
Reader, it was that simple.
I admit I booed a bit at my screening when Peter (Tom Holland), casually using the same mass surveillance tech as Batman in The Dark Knight (oh, how far we’ve fallen in our superhero morals when even Spider-Man is basically using Flock), discovers that the person who’s mind-controlling countless people in New York City is Jean Elaine Grey.
Further Down the MCU Rabbit Hole
First, I don’t know how much this lands for anyone who doesn’t read comics or care about the X-Men. The character has been on screen before, first played by Famke Janssen and then by Sophie Turner. She was last featured in the 2019 X-Men movie Dark Phoenix, which limped to $65 million domestically (to give you an idea of the drop-off, the previous film in the franchise, X-Men: Apocalypse, which is trash, grossed over double that). So it's tough to say that ordinary people are heavily invested in Jean Grey or her turn into the Dark Phoenix. It’s a character reveal that’s very important to comics nerds, but to normies it’s Skippy McDippy.
On a thematic level, the story brings in Jean Grey because her journey is supposed to mirror Peter’s. They’re both isolated and angry young people. Jean represents a dark path that Peter could go down if he continues to hide behind his powers and cut himself off from the world (this is also manifested in the emergence of his new powers, which include organic web-shooters, heightened spidey sense, and, for some reason, increased rage).
While there’s far more MCU characters in this than there are Spider-Man characters (you get Scorpion and some quick cameos from Tombstone, Tarantula, and Boomerang), most of them feel chosen to represent Peter’s loneliness and repression. The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) is someone whose personal loss has made him a violent recluse and vigilante while Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) wears a little bracelet doodad to repress his Hulk side[1]. Jean’s rage is meant to tie into these supporting characters reflecting Peter’s angst.
Even as someone relatively well-versed in the MCU, this was so confusing. Wasn’t the whole thing in Avengers: Endgame that Banner managed to bring his two personalities together into “Smart Hulk”? But in She-Hulk and now this, he wears a bracelet to be human. Obviously, it’s cheaper to just have Mark Ruffalo show up than always use CG, but still. ↩︎
Marvel is free to do with their characters what they like, but the Jean stuff feels both forced and redundant. There’s no rule that Jean has to be the kind, likable character from the comics, but I’m mystified why she’s there at all. Once you casually introduce mutants into this world, you’ve opened up a can of worms because the whole point of the MCU is that there’s a limited number of “special people,” and mutants (people who have superpowers because of a genetic mutation) throw off the entire curve. Ms. Marvel indicated that its main character, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), is a mutant, but whose powers were activated by a special bangle. Jean is just a straight-up mutant, and if these people are already running around, it raises the question of why they didn’t help in any of the world-saving events we saw in previous movies. Marvel knows the fragility of its “sacred timeline” (the main universe where everything happens), which is why the new Fantastic Four team exists in a separate universe, and only arrived in the main universe in the Thunderbolts* post-credit scene.
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