Before Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey became the villain of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers wrote an entire draft built around Shadow King, the telepathic X-Men villain, and Marvel Studios told them not to call him by that name.
McKenna walked through the film’s long search for a villain on The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood. It started with characters the writers kept losing to other Spider-Man projects.
Kraven Got Away
The trouble began on No Way Home. “We would break a story for two weeks, and we’d have Spot as our villain,” McKenna said, only to learn Spot was in the outline for Across the Spider-Verse. Kraven the Hunter became the fallback, because Sony had told the writers it was never going to make a standalone Kraven movie.
Their version would have turned New York City into “a ‘Home Alone’ trap for Spider-Man, where he’s set up booby traps everywhere,” with Kraven stalking Peter Parker for the whole movie, possibly as a hired hand rather than the main villain. Then Sony moved ahead with Kraven the Hunter anyway. “It was a joke,” McKenna said. “It was like, ‘Oh no, Sony’s making a standalone Kraven movie. You’ve got to be kidding me.'”
Chameleon Became Something Else
When Brand New Day came around, McKenna and Sommers went looking again. Chameleon was the next idea, reworked as a body-hopping telepath rather than a master of disguise, since “the MCU had already done shape-shifting with the Skrulls.” That door closed too, because Kraven’s half-brother Dmitri, who becomes Chameleon in the comics, appears in Kraven the Hunter.
A Villain Nobody Could See
The telepathy idea survived and led the writers to Shadow King, the psychic villain Charles Xavier first encounters in the comics. McKenna liked the image of Peter “chasing a disembodied voice through New York,” first sensing the villain jump from body to body with his Spider-Sense, then losing him once that sense goes out of whack.
A telepath also raised a rights problem. Instead of a Sony-controlled villain, McKenna said, “if you’re doing a telepath who might be a mutant, you’re now in Marvel’s sandbox.” Marvel gave them room, but only so much. “Marvel was like, ‘We’re still trying to figure out what we’re doing with the mutants. Don’t call him Shadow King. Don’t call him Farouk,'” McKenna said.
In the draft they wrote, the villain spends the movie hunting for his own body, which had been hidden somewhere in New York City long ago by people who knew how dangerous he was. It stalled because “just having a disembodied voice the entire time and not having a face-to-face villain” was not enough to carry the story, McKenna said. “So much of Spider-Man’s stories are so great because of his connection with the villain.”
The Call In September 2024
The answer came in September 2024, when a producer called McKenna with news. “She said, ‘We got Jean Grey.’ It was like, ‘Oh, thank God,'” he recalled. Getting Jean Grey, he added, “completely unlocked the villain plot.”
Even then there were limits. The word “mutant” is never spoken in Brand New Day, McKenna said, “because that has not been unveiled in the MCU yet.” “We were walking that line,” he added.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton from a script by McKenna and Sommers, with Tom Holland as Peter Parker and Sink as Jean Grey.
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