“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” has swung to the top of the box office since its release last week. The fourth Tom Holland-led mainline “Spider-Man” film, from Sony and Marvel Studios, broke the record for the biggest domestic box office run and has already surpassed the $1.5 billion mark at the global box office. And, again, the movie has only been out for a week.
The latest adventure sees Peter Parker (Holland) dealing with the fallout of making everyone forget who he was at the end of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” along with a spider gene that seems to be getting stronger, giving him new and unexpected powers. Oh, and there’s a new villain who can take over people’s minds. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is there, too, as is his alter ego, the Hulk. So is Frank Castle, also known as the Punisher (Jon Bernthal).
But how did this intoxicating stew come together? We asked “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers all about their super-powered sequel. Major spoiler warning for the entire conversation, really. If you are one of the 10 people who hasn’t watched “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” well, time to correct that. The interview will still be here when you get back.
It Was Always Meant to Be a More Intimate Story
“Spider-Man: Brand. New Day” marks a departure for your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Yes, there is an oversized force that he has to deal with but the emotional bedrock of the movie is much closer to the earthy “Spider-Man: Homecoming” than the later installments, which saw him battling space aliens and wearing a high-tech suit designed by Tony Stark.
This, McKenna and Sommers said, was always a part of the plan.
“I think it came from not only organically from where that [last] movie ended, where we were able to hand ourselves a real dilemma and a real new beginning for Peter, but I you know all of us and particularly Tom really wanted to explore a darker, more mature chapter. We were all on board,” said McKenna. “We felt what he had been through in the last movie with essentially his metaphorical death, the death of Peter Parker essentially – what would that look like? And as much as it was like, Oh, we get to go back to basics, we knew that there would be a huge emotional toll that would go with giving up your past, giving up your life, giving up all of your loved ones. We knew we knew we’d be able to explore some deeper, more personal elements of his journey.”
Sommers added: “On a practical level too, I think everybody felt like, Well, are we going to try to go bigger than that last minute? What would that even be like? Six Spider-Mans? Like what? I think everyone agreed that just trying to go even bigger was not the way to go, and then that just led right into everything Chris was just talking about. There was no question that doing something deeper was the answer.”
And deeper they went.
Spider-Man, Mentor-Free
Another notable difference in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is that, for the first time in the Holland timeline, Peter Parker is free of an older mentor figure. In “Homecoming,” Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) kept a watchful eye on Peter; “Far From Home” saw him guided by superspy (or was it a Skrull in disguise?) Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson); and “No Way Home” saw him butting heads with Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch).
This was also at the top of Sommers and McKenna’s to-do list.
“We’ve seen that he’s going to these mentors. He’s a younger character. He has people he looks up to and sometimes it goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t. But let’s not do that anymore. We want to tell a story about him growing up,” said Sommers. “Part of growing up is that he needs to start addressing things on his own. He needs to start coming up with answers on his own and not looking to others and it would be fun to see him interact with people as more of an equal and an adult. His relationship with Punisher, even his relationship with [Damage Control member] Metzger or his relationship with Jean DeWolff, these are more mature relationships – as a coworker, as a colleague, as a fellow adult, as opposed to he’s that kid coming to ask the older person for counsel or guidance.”
As for why they chose to have Bruce Banner in “Brand New Day,” McKenna said that they knew, when they gave Peter a “spider-problem,” he would need to ask for some help and that Banner would be “perfect for that story, that he would go to learn about that would be Bruce Banner.” The character also paid off doubly so – with a heavy that can inhabit people’s minds, imagine how destructive it would be if she could occupy the mind of the Hulk.
“Hulk would be a great legacy character for our villain to be able to mind control and then we can get a great Spider-Man-versus-Hulk fight. So that was one of those things that lined up in a way, and we were really, really happy and lucky that Marvel allowed us to use Hulk in the movie because I think he just worked in so many ways,” said McKenna. “That was that was a case of things could not have things lined up more perfectly, and there was a lot of gratitude that we were able to use Bruce Banner and Hulk.”
Jean Grey Was Chosen After Other Villains Didn’t Work
Of course, that dastardly villain occupying peoples’ minds is, of course, revealed to be Jean Grey. This is a young Jean Grey, not yet a part of any super-team and before she met all of her iconic buddies at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (yes, that is really what it’s called). This is her grappling with her powers and forming new abilities; by the end of the movie she is fully equipped to become one of the MCU’s premiere bad-asses but is still an awkward kid, on a bus seemingly to a location upstate – a school, perhaps?
But it wasn’t always like this.
McKenna and Sommers said that there were a couple of alternate villains developed and then discarded, before they fully committed to Jean Grey and, in effect, jump-starting the X-Men era for the MCU.
“We had mind control and we had this story about Peter’s metamorphosis that we loved. We had mind control that was working well but we didn’t have the right character for that story,” McKenna said.
McKenna said that he had just landed in Boston for a family wedding and got a call from one of the producers, who told him that the writers could actually use Jean Grey.
“I just remember going, Oh, thank God! Now we can now we can tell a story that with a really great character that can mirror Peter’s in a really great way and we can get to a place. Because obviously she’s such an important character in the MCU. We will have even more leeway to humanize this character and redeem her by the end,” McKenna said. “And it seemed everything started lining up once we had Jean, and it was really exciting. It was the breakthrough moment.”
Unlike earlier “Spider-Man” movies, dating back to the Sam Raimi films starring Tobey Maguire, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” features Spider-Man facing off against a villain who is not a traditional Spider-Man villain. Instead, McKenna said, it was a Marvel villain, further placing the story within the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“We really needed the right character playing that role,” said McKenna.
When we asked how long they toiled over the villain, waiting to get the green light for Jean Grey, the writers said months.
“We were exploring other characters and it just wasn’t … It was Jean really helped unlock it. She was the missing piece. It was the piece that the movie was dying for,” McKenna explained. “Once we got her, then everything started unlocking.”
Yes, Rosario Dawson Had a Role
In an earlier version of the movie, Claire Temple, aka the Night Nurse (played by Rosario Dawson in the “Daredevil” series), showed up for a brief scene. While there have been rumors that her scene would have been toward the end of the movie, when Peter Parker wakes up in the hospital, that scene now involves the Punisher and is one of the funniest, most affecting scenes.
McKenna and Sommers said that it was actually an earlier scene in the movie where the Night Nurse and Spider-Man would have interacted. It followed Spider-Man’s fight with Scorpion. Spider-Man goes to the hospital and has a scene with the Night Nurse.
“Rosario Dawson is great. I wasn’t there for those discussions. But it was great. If anything, you have a movie that is two-and-a-half hours long, and it’s almost an embarrassment of riches with so many great characters and so many great scenes,” said McKenna.
“The scene they did was a good scene I think the only reason it’s not in the final cut was just it was probably cut for time because it was very good,” added Sommers.
The scene would have been right before Peter goes to see Bruce at the college and McKenna said “it’s kind of a double beat.”
In the words of the great Christopher McQuarrie – it could go, so it went.
Yelena Was Always in “Brand New Day”
Unlike Jean Grey, who was a late addition, and Night Nurse didn’t make the final cut, Yelena (Florence Pugh) aka the new Black Widow, was always a part of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”
“We were talking about Yelena and then the idea that she’s in the banya and that he has to get in. He won’t take his mask off. It was one of those things that made us all laugh, and then the next thing you know, it’s happening,” said Sommers.
“It existed in every draft. We have to have to have the sequence. We just knew. We felt like it’s always better to him on his heels. Tom playing Spider-Man on his heels is just the dream. And her putting him on his heels just felt like, Oh we gotta have this in the movie, even though we knew we could only have her probably for a little bit because of the Avengers timeline and everything,” said McKenna. (It’s his wife’s favorite scene in the movie.)
The scene is also a little sexy; Yelena is submerged underwater but clearly nude and Peter is in a towel (and his mask). Sommers said that the scene’s sexual underpinnings were discussed. But it felt right for the movie because this isn’t Peter in high school – this is Peter as a young adult.
“That came up. It’s like, Can we? Should we? And then it was the same thing – it’s like, Well, he’s a big boy now,” said Sommers.
About That Post-Credits Tag
The post-credits scene for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” features the Spider-Man tracking app that Ned developed picking up a new ping – it’s Spider-Man but he seems to be … off-world. It’s unclear what this exactly means. Is it teeing up “Avengers: Doomsday” or “Secret Wars?” The next Spider-Man adventure? Who knows!
One thing’s for sure – McKenna and Sommers aren’t telling us what it means.
“It’s fun. It’s a little tease of something to come. Or maybe not. I don’t know,” said McKenna.
McKenna and Sommers said that they have written dozens of tags, across their Marvel Studios movies, that never saw the light of day.
“At some point I wrote something involving Spider-Man the TVA and this was a while ago,” said Sommers. Yes, this was before the Time Variance Authority emerged in “Loki,” its second season and, eventually, “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Sommers continued: “We’ve written a whole bunch of things. You’re like, Oh, that would be so cool, and then ultimately decide, Well, we’d rather point towards this or drop a clue about that.”
They both love that the conversation about the post-credits scene is ongoing and encourage active discussion around it. Not that they’re going to elaborate any further on it.
“It’s purposely vague,” said McKenna.
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is in theaters now.
