Spider-Man: Brand New Day Story Changed Repeatedly as Sony Launched Those Terrible Villain Spin-Off Films

Early ideas for Spider-Man: Brand New Day included alternate villains, a British alter ego, and several changes to avoid characters Sony ended up using in its own Spider-Universe films.

Speaking to The Bulwark, Spider-Man writer Chris McKenna revealed some of the story concepts discussed, and then discarded, during what sounds like a lengthy search for Brand New Day's plot. Most difficult, it seems, was a decision on who the movie's villain would be — with Jean Grey not finalized until September 2024, less than a year before the film began shooting.

That's despite years of work by McKenna and his co-writing partner Erik Summers, who together have penned all of Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies (plus Ant-Man and the Wasp, with forthcoming credits on both Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars).

As has been discussed previously, Brand New Day was always conceived as a smaller-scale movie following the multiversal multi-Spider-Men antics of No Way Home. But the idea of Peter Parker going through a kind of metamorphosis took time to be accepted, with the pitch initially being discarded.

"We went down some different roads," McKenna revealed. "We came back to — this was one of our original ideas, [the idea of] metamorphosis — that we went away from and then came back to it. And people were like, 'Woah this is great, where'd this come from?' Well, we pitched it to you a year and a half ago before we went down that other road!

"And I'm glad, maybe we had to do that to get back to the metamorphosis story, which I thought was the most simple, potent, cool idea. Someone who's resisting change going through one he couldn't control. Particularly with the MCU [version of the] character, as we never saw him get his powers."

What was that other story avenue McKenna and Summers explored? Here, McKenna says he "can't talk about" this in detail in case Marvel still wants to use some of its plot elements in future, but "there were similarities" to what Brand New Day eventually became.

"[Such as] him falling in with MJ, but she didn't know him," McKenna said. "So he had to have a persona he put on. At one point we had him putting on his British accent, so it would have been Tom's British accent, but Tom from Queens pretending he's British, as he'd run into MJ while Spider-Man and thought he now needed to disguise his voice." In this version of the story, Peter would have introduced himself to MJ as Ben Reilly — the name of a cloned version of Spider-Man from the comics.

McKenna says it took time before it was clear Zendaya would return for the movie, or the extent to which she would appear. Regardless, the writers were keen not to quickly undo the ending of No Way Home. "There was an early version of the story where she's like 'I figured it out,'" McKenna said, though this too was scrapped.

One dramatically different idea would have opened with Peter as "a badass hero in South East Asia, taking on South East Asian gangs. He's living on a boat, fixing the engine, making his own web fluid. And then he gets a video message that Spider-Man is back in New York charming fans — [an] imposter. And he gets there and finds this guy is using his web fluid and suit, and he's done the thing Peter Parker has never done and copyrighted his brand. And then he has to hire Matt Murdock to fight it. And then he gets a cease and desist from this other guy. 'You can't pretend you're Spider-Man!'"

"It was pretty fun, but it was a very different story," McKenna reflected.

Yet another story idea would have begun with Peter falling ill and hallucinating a message passed to him by his local bodega's cat, who would have talked and told him to hunt down the Spider-Totems. Peter would then have woken up in a hospital where this would have been revealed as a dream brought on by appendicitis. While in hospital, however, Peter would have missed paying his rent — something that would lead to him getting kicked out of his apartment and moving in with two guys down the hall. These friendly neighbours would then be revealed as villains Overkill and Boomerang, which would lead to him uncovering a deeper mystery.

Several ideas were pitched with the sense of a "Die Hard with a Vengeance concept," where Peter faces off against a street level villain over the course of a day. There were also other ideas for who the shape-shifting Jean Grey character could be, including Chameleon — though this process was hampered by Sony's ongoing push to release its critically-panned Spider Universe spinoffs, such as Madame Web, Morbius, and Kraven.

"We did not begin with Jean Grey, the way we got to her was... we got the idea for the metamorphosis [story], we needed a villain," McKenna began. "And we were thinking, are there any Spider-Man classic villains we could use that we have not used before? Obviously, No Way Home, we were competing with the Spider-Verse movies, and then the Sony standalones. [It was] just frustrating, we were eating each other's lunches.

"We would break a story for two weeks, and we had Spot as our villain in No Way Home, and then we'd find out, 'Oh, we've just read the new outline for Across the Spider-Verse, and Spot's in it, so, can't have that.' And then we'd go, 'At least we have Kraven.' We were told Sony would never make a Kraven standalone movie. We had fun ways to get into the Kraven character, turning New York into a Home Alone trap for Spider-Man, booby traps everywhere, a big star as an iconic Kraven who's just hunting down Peter Parker, even as a tertiary villain but someone who's stalking him the whole movie. And then it was like a joke: 'Sony is making a standalone Kraven movie.' It was like, 'You gotta be kidding me.'

"When we had the metamorphosis Peter Parker story, I was on the phone to Summers saying, 'Is there any way to do Chameleon?'" McKenna continued. "How do we do Chameleon, how do we make it fresh? Because the MCU has already done shapeshifting with the Skrulls. And then we were thinking telepathy — where someone is taking people, possessing people. So we got excited by that... and then we found out, oh no, actually, in Kraven, his half-brother Sergei, who's Chameleon in the comic books, is in it.

"But once you go down the telepathy route you're in mutant territory, which is immediately tricky. So we backed into what could be a tricky situation, which is — oh, you're not creating a Sony-owned, Sony-controlled villain anymore, if you're doing a telepath who might be a mutant, you're now in Marvel's sandbox. And that became definitely trickier as, at the time, Disney had taken over Fox and were getting control over the X-Men and the mutants, and they were already planning how to unveil and use the mutants in their movies. So I suddenly found myself in something of a trench war, where we didn't want to step on anyone's toes on what they're doing."

Another potential alternative here was Shadow King, an invisible telepath discovered by Charles Xavier, whose storyline would have seen him hunting for his lost body that was hidden somewhere in New York. But even this ran into problems as the Legion TV show had used a version of the character too. As McKenna wrestled with a version of the character that they were told couldn't even be named Shadow King, he finally got a call that the use of Jean Grey was on the table. This was September 2024, three years after No Way Home launched in theaters, and 11 months from Brand New Day beginning its shoot.

Despite all the changes in earlier versions of the script, one scene apparently remained even from the film's earliest incarnations: Peter meeting Yelena in the bathhouse, as McKenna knew it would be fun.

After a long road to release, however, Brand New Day has certainly done the business for Sony and Marvel. As of this month, the film has overtaken Star Wars: The Force Awakens to become the highest-grossing movie of all time in North America, with an overall global box office total that now stands at $2.47 billion. Will it be the highest grossing film of 2026 overall? We'll have to wait for Avengers: Doomsday this December in order to find out.