Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now out in theaters, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s worst-kept secret is now out there, as well: the MCU Mutant Saga has officially begun, just as the Multiverse Saga is coming to an end. Brand New Day introduced the MCU’s version of Jean Grey (Sadie Sink), who took on the Department of Damage Control after they abducted and experimented on her sister to learn more about her mutant abilities.
By the end of the film, Jean had a new perspective on the world, a new direction for her life, and a whole new level of powers at her disposal. Meanwhile, MCU fans gained a lot of insight about what’s coming in the X-Men reboot, including these six key details.
Jean Grey being Sadie Sink (24) gives us a general age range for the X-Men characters that will show up in the MCU reboot. Sure, there are rumors that the reboot could balance older, more experienced X-Men/teachers (Beast, Storm, maybe even Emma Frost) with younger students like Jean and Cyclops.
Either way, it seems that the X-Men reboot will be framing the kids as young adults. It’s not the first time the franchise has taken that approach: X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Apocalypse both went with a younger squad of X-Men, but neither film arguably made age and growing pains of young adulthood their centerpiece.
Now that we know Jean Grey’s age range, and that it sets a range for the rest of the primary X-Men characters, we can better judge some other casting, as well. Going into Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s premiere, rumors swirled about who Marvel Studios was looking to cast as Charles Xavier, aka Professor X. The latest wave of names (Bill Skarsgård, Drew Starkey) hovered around age 35, a much younger take on Xavier than Sir Patrick Stewart, but slightly older than James McAvoy’s Xavier was meant to be at the start of X-Men: First Class. If Xavier is mid-30s, we expect Magneto to be cast at a similar age (which raises its own questions about the character’s WWII origins).
Then again, other actors rumored to play Xavier or Magneto (Patrick Wilson, Adam Driver, Tom Pelphrey) all sit in the age range of mid-40s to early-50s, so we could easily be headed for middle-aged Charles and Erik.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s big twist is the reveal that DODC head Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) is secretly abducting mutants (and other superpowered people) and experimenting on them. As seen with Jean Grey and her sister, Sara (Olivia Booth-Ford), Metzger’s end goal seems to be mapping and measuring how certain superpowers function, so that he can recreate those functions (read: powers) in the bodies of other individuals.
The reveal of Metzger’s nefarious activities instantly changes Damage Control’s role in the MCU, and how it correlates to the X-Men reboot. Before, it seemed like Damage Control could be a government agency paving the way toward X-Men lore like the Mutant Registration Act, or the dreaded internment camps that lead to dark future timelines; now, it seems more like the DODC will have a branch explicitly dedicated to turning superpowered individuals into government assets, which is much more in line with the Weapon X program from the comics. That genetic research program produced some of the world’s deadliest enforcers and assassins, including Wolverine, Sabertooth, Deadpool, and Weapon X-23 (aka Laura Kinney). The MCU version is already poised to do so much more, while still opening the door to new versions of those aforementioned characters.
One signature piece of the X-Men franchise is the technological restraints that interfere with mutant abilities, known as an “inhibitor collar.” They show up all over different adaptations of the X-Men and are a powerful symbol that resonates with all kinds of underserved communities, or those who have been victims of brutal oppression, if not genocide.
The MCU has slowly but surely advanced technology that will become a major threat to mutants: the inhibitor first developed by Bruce Banner to control his Hulk-outs. In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter Parker pushes that technology forward, developing a Universal Inhibitor Chip that can suppress any kind of superpower or genetic enhancement. As Spider-Man learned in battle, applying a chip may be too hard, but it seems clear the DODC will take that same chip and its tech and apply it to a different design that can be implemented a lot more effectively (cuffs and collars).
What distinguishes the X-Men from so many other comic book teams is that their battle is quite literally for the future. Not only do the X-Men need to help usher mutants safely into a future where they are not hunted to extinction, but there have been multiple X-Men stories that reveal dark future timelines in which mutants do not prevail. Some of those timelines produce time-traveling agents like Cable or Bishop, who try to steer time and events in a better direction; others are simply nightmare dystopias, where villains like Apocalypse, or maybe man and/or machine, have risen to dominance.
By pushing the concept of inhibitors this early, not to mention the intense scenes of Metzger torturing Jean and Sara, it’s already feeling like the dark future timelines the X-Men fight against could be a very real focus of the MCU reboot. After all the complicated concepts of the Multiverse Saga, future probabilities and alternate timelines will feel like basic math to MCU fans.
When Jean Grey hops a bus for upstate New York at the end of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, we all know where she is headed: Westchester, and the school of Professor Charles Xavier. Brand New Day took big swings to equate Jean’s traumatic mutant origin story with Peter Parker’s painful life lessons as a young superhero, culminating in the thematic conclusion that healing is a process that requires community.
Brand New Day‘s message seems to be hitting with fans, and also seems to be a clear bridge to the upcoming X-Men reboot. Jean will be in a jaded, lonely place from which she builds her bonds with the other X-Men, replacing her shattered family with a found-family that welcomes her and supports her power (in every sense of the word). In the hands of Thunderbolts director Jake Schrier, it’s not hard to imagine the larger X-Men reboot achieving that thematic goal for all its major characters (and hopefully, the audience).
