Jean Grey was finally introduced in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, setting up the franchise’s first member of the X-Men and showing how the MCU may be treating mutants going forward. Ahead of Brand New Day, the question of who Sadie Sink was playing was one of the film’s biggest mysteries; the surprise reveal that she was both a villain and one of the most iconic X-Men was a shocking one, and the rest of the film’s surprise reveals just made things weirder.
We already know that the X-Men will play a big role in the MCU going forward, but we’re not sure yet exactly how. The Fox X-Men will return in Avengers: Doomsday, with James Marsden’s Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, and a few others appearing. However, the MCU is also setting up its own team of X-Men, with Jake Schrier developing an X-Men reboot. While having two different iterations of each character so close together may be a bit confusing, it lets us compare and contrast the first live-action team with the MCU’s different take on the characters.
A few mutants have already been introduced in the MCU ahead of Jean Grey, those being Namor, Ms. Marvel, and Wonder Man, but Jean is the first proper X-Men character to appear. Spider-Man: Brand New Day doesn’t even use the word “mutant,” so the film clearly doesn’t set definitive rules as to how mutants work in the MCU. However, a few things are revealed that, when put together, highlight some big changes to how the franchise will treat mutants, going forward.
In Marvel Comics, mutants are often born as regular humans, with many not knowing that they have a latent X-gene in their DNA. At points of immense emotional distress, often in adolescence, the X-gene activates and reveals the mutation, whether that be powers, a change in appearance, or whatever else. We don’t see the origin of Jean Grey’s powers in Brand New Day; her earliest scene involves her sister teaching her how to use her body-hopping telepathy. So, we can’t say if this initial pathway to mutation has been changed for the MCU.
However, Brand New Day sees Jean seemingly have a second mutation; something that is definitely part of X-Men lore. When Jean discovers that the DODC killed her sister in captivity, Jean gets a major upgrade, telekinetically freezing blocks of New York City, destroying portions of the Damage Control facility, and upgrading her telepathy to control multiple people at once, at much greater distances. She didn’t have these abilities before this moment, and considering that they came after a point of immense emotional distress, it almost seems like Jean’s already-active X-gene unlocked another layer.
The bangles’ energy releases activated Kamala Khan’s X-gene in Ms. Marvel, which may highlight that the MCU is introducing several new ways for mutants to actually mutate. Kamala was never a mutant in the comics, and neither was Wonder Man, so these new rules could be used to reframe additional MCU heroes as mutants, tying them into future X-Men stories.
When the Fox X-Men team returns for Doomsday, we will have been getting stories involving this team for 26 years. It is the iteration of the X-Men that the average person thinks of when they picture the team, and the MCU is currently attempting to replace that with its own X-Men. This will undoubtedly be a difficult task, but to do this most effectively, making these types of big changes is probably for the best.
Brand New Day gives Jean Grey a new origin and changes how her powers work, but she is still the same character at her core. Giving other MCU mutants unique origin stories provides fans of the FOX movies a reason to check out these new films, as they aren’t just rehashing stories from two decades ago. Plus, it’ll prevent viewers from constantly comparing and contrasting the FOX versions and the MCU versions, allowing the new team to be judged on their own merits.
The one aspect of this new status quo that some fans probably won’t like, however, is turning non-mutant heroes into mutants. There was a bit of backlash surrounding switching Ms. Marvel from an Inhuman into a mutant, although this didn’t seem to occur with the release of Wonder Man. However, it is possible that if the MCU keeps making these changes, it’ll result in more harm than good.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters.
