Spoilers for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” follow. For all the records “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” has been breaking at the box office—including crossing $700 million domestically while pushing past $1.8 billion worldwide— one element of the blockbuster continues to prove considerably more divisive: Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey. Some fans have balked at just how ruthless—and outright immoral—the future X-Men hero appears in the film. But screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers say there was one important line they deliberately kept Jean from crossing: “Technically,” she never kills anyone.
“I think technically, she’s not responsible for any deaths,” Sommers told The Hollywood Reporter this week, acknowledging that Jean nevertheless causes plenty of damage. “But you come away with the impression, certainly, that she’s caused a lot of destruction in mayhem. Even if you’re going to have a villain who really is redeemed at the end or goes through a transformation, you have to start them off in a place where they feel formidable.”
Jean’s actions nevertheless go well beyond typical superhero collateral damage. She possesses innocent people, manipulates Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, and leaves considerable destruction behind—prompting some fans to question just how far Marvel has pushed a character traditionally associated with empathy and compassion.
For Sommers, though, making Jean genuinely threatening was necessary for the story to work.
“If it doesn’t feel like this is going to be someone who is a challenge to our hero, physically, emotionally, mentally, then you don’t really buy it,” he continued.
McKenna said another major attraction was allowing Jean to remain an unknown quantity for much of the movie, keeping Peter and the audience on essentially the same footing.
“What we were really excited about was this villain got to be a mystery for so long in the movie,” McKenna said. “We were in Peter’s shoes. We were not putting the audience ahead of him, so he was reacting to everything, and we were with him reacting.”
McKenna and Sommers also confirmed during the interview that their Marvel work is continuing beyond Spider-Man: the pair have been working on “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” reuniting professionally with Joe and Anthony Russo, whose relationship with the writers stretches back to “Community.”
“We’ve been excited to be able to work on ‘The Avengers.’ It’s really all we can say at this point,” McKenna said. “We love working with Marvel. We obviously have a relationship going back a long time with the Russos from ‘Community.’”
McKenna and Sommers have been fixtures of Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise since “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” also writing “Far From Home,” “No Way Home,” and now “Brand New Day.” Their involvement in Marvel’s next two Avengers films extends that relationship into the studio’s biggest upcoming event movies.
As for Jean, the writers’ comments make clear that her extreme behavior was very much by design. The challenge was making her formidable enough to credibly threaten Peter while still leaving room for the transformation Sommers describes.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is in theaters now.
