Warning: Major spoilers follow for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, now playing in theaters. So if you don’t want to be spoiled, quick, turn back now.
Update: Sadie Sink has confirmed she will star in the X-Men movie.
Mutant detected! It’s official. Sadie Sink is Jean Grey.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters, and per Variety’s spoiler breakdown, the character Marvel guarded through an entire marketing campaign is exactly who everyone said she was. Sink debuts as the founding X-Men telepath, now in the MCU for the first time.
Regular readers can take the victory lap. The leaked character details pointed to Sink as the film’s hidden villain, and Steve Lacy blurted out the rest on the premiere red carpet. The movie confirms all of it.
Jean Grey’s Role In Brand New Day
Sink stays faceless for the first half of the film.
Tom Holland’s Peter Parker spends it hunting a villain who can possess anyone within 33 feet, jumping between minds all over New York City.
Her target is the Department of Damage Control, which has something she wants locked in a vault. A break-in using a possessed Scorpion, played by Michael Mando, goes nowhere.
So Jean escalates.
She takes over Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, removes the inhibitor keeping the Hulk suppressed, and points the monster at Damage Control’s skyscraper.
Spider-Man teams with Jon Bernthal’s Punisher to bring the Hulk down.
Jean reaches the vault but gets tranquilized and captured by Damage Control CEO Bill Metzger, played by Severance star Tramell Tillman.
Damage Control Is The Real Villain
Here’s the turn: Damage Control is the true villain of Brand New Day.
Metzger cages Jean and runs experiments to figure out how her psychic powers work.
A flashback reveals Jean had an older sister, Sara, with the same abilities. Damage Control officers grabbed Sara in a park years earlier, and Jean realizes she is being held in the same cell where her sister died under testing.
Jean breaks loose and throws a psychic bubble over the city that freezes nearly everyone in New York in place. Only Spider-Man can push through it, and he talks her down from her revenge.
While Jean is inside Peter’s memories of his late Aunt May, Punisher lines up a sniper shot from miles away. Spidey shoves Jean clear at the last second and takes the bullet himself.
Jean quietly keeps Peter alive with her powers while he recovers in the hospital, then slips away before he can say goodbye. The final shot puts her on a bus out of the city, with the fall foliage pointing upstate toward Westchester.
Per Variety, the film never once says the words X-Men or mutant. It doesn’t have to. The destination writes itself.
The First Mutant Of The Next Marvel Universe
Sink is the third live-action Jean Grey, following Famke Janssen in Fox’s original trilogy and Sophie Turner in the prequel films.
She is the first who belongs to Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios, and that is the whole ballgame.
The legacy Fox mutants, including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Alan Cumming and Channing Tatum, handle Avengers: Doomsday in December opposite Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom. That group is the farewell tour.
Sink is the future.
Kevin Feige has flat out said the X-Men will be the core of Marvel’s next universe after Secret Wars, part of a slate the studio has mapped out through 2042.
The young roster is already assembling around her, with Samara Weaving cast as Emma Frost in Jake Schreier’s X-Men movie. Kit Connor is also said to have been cast as Cyclops.
And Marvel built its mutant-era villain in plain sight.
Turning Damage Control into a corporation that abducts and experiments on powered kids gives the reboot its Trask Industries, using an organization the MCU seeded all the way back in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
And the big question next is, where does the use of the inhibitor device go next?!
Brand New Day was sold as a back-to-basics Spider-Man movie. What Marvel actually released is the launchpad for the next fifteen years of the MCU.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theaters. For everything on the movie, check out our complete Brand New Day guide.
