UPDATE 9/10: The reviews are in, and no critic scored the game down over the character faces — the knocks are story and variety.
UPDATE 9/8: Another face from that trailer just got a name: Insomniac confirms the sword-wielding villain is Lady Deathstrike, not Psylocke.
Eleven days before Marvel’s Wolverine launches, the loudest fight around the game isn’t about combat depth or physical discs. It’s about one character’s face.
When Grummz posted three faces from the launch trailer and declared them all hit with “the AAA ugly stick,” the face doing the heavy lifting was Jean Grey.
That’s because Jean’s look has been fought over since before Insomniac ever showed her officially. She’s had three faces. Fans have gone to war over every one.
UPDATE 9/11: Insomniac’s writer explains the Sabretooth and Logan scene from the Washington Post review.
Face One: The Hack Leak
The first Jean Grey nobody was supposed to see.
In December 2023, the ransomware attack on Insomniac dumped early Marvel’s Wolverine development material online, including early character art for Jean.
That early model became the benchmark. In Grummz’s words, it was “the first, beautiful model.”
Fans held onto those screenshots, and everything Insomniac showed afterward got measured against them.
Face Two: “Grocery Store Auntie”
The second face also came from leaks, and it started the fire.
In June 2024, a principal artist with credits at studios like Naughty Dog, Rocksteady, and Respawn vented about pitching beautiful female character designs and getting ignored, with each revision turning his characters into “grocery store aunties.”
Grummz applied it straight to Jean. “Look at what happened to Jean Grey from @insomniacgames Marvel’s Wolverine from these leaked early screenshots of the first, beautiful model, to the masculine, world weary version we have today,” he wrote. “They are ruining @Marvel.”
That same thread flagged Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement with the game, pointing to the firm’s own tweets and an Insomniac narrative director who defended the company.
Sweet Baby was also attached to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the game that cost Warner Bros. $200 million.
Face Three: The June Reveal
The third face is the official one.
At June’s State of Play, Jean Grey finally debuted in real gameplay, fighting alongside Logan and voiced by Krizia Bajos per the leaked cast list.
Game director Mike Daly told IGN she fights on her own, opens enemies up for Logan, and uses telepathy to dim enemy perception during stealth, with the two working together more as the game goes on.
The finished model read as a cleaner pass, closer to the red-haired comic book Jean fans know.
Insomniac never addressed the leaked designs or any changes, but the criticism cooled.
The Launch Trailer Reopened It
The truce lasted three months and did not survive one close-up.
Thursday’s launch trailer put Jean’s face on screen next to Mystique and Deathstrike, and Grummz clipped all three. “Yeah, no lessons learned here,” he wrote, a callback to his own 2024 thread, in a post that cleared 4,900 likes and 84,000 views.
The replies filled with the same 2024 arguments, down to a Drake meme sorting Western and Eastern character design.
Here’s the thing about face three, though. It’s the last one.
Jean is effectively the co-lead of this game, standing with Logan and Team X against Bolivar Trask with her powers wired into the combat and stealth systems.
Reviews arrive September 10. Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15, exclusively on PS5.
On September 15, the only Jean Grey that matters is the one in the game.
