‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Almost Had a Villain You Never Even Saw Coming

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ has spent the past several weeks dominating box office charts, and now that the film has been out long enough for its creative team to start talking freely, the behind-the-scenes stories are coming fast. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s fourth Tom Holland outing ultimately built its central mystery around Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, a body-hopping psychic threat that spends much of the film’s runtime as an unseen menace haunting New York.

That character design did not come easily. Screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have described a long, winding development process for the film’s antagonist, one shaped repeatedly by rights complications between Marvel Studios and Sony over who could use which characters and when.

Now McKenna has revealed that Jean Grey was far from the first name on that shortlist, and one of the earlier options would have taken the movie somewhere far stranger. Speaking on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, the co-writer explained that the team seriously explored building the film around Shadow King, the X-Men villain best known in the comics as a disembodied telepath who preys on people’s minds.

According to McKenna, the appeal of Shadow King was obvious on paper. He described the character as “a telepath that first gets discovered by Charles Xavier,” with an origin tied to an encounter in Egypt, and pitched a version of the film where the villain would spend the entire runtime as a voice rather than a body.

The plan would have had the telepathic villain searching for his own physical body, which had been hidden away somewhere in New York City. McKenna elaborated on the concept, saying the character’s body “basically had been taken from him and hidden somewhere in New York City a long time ago by people who recognised that this guy was really dangerous.”

The idea was that audiences would never actually see the threat’s true form until deep into the story, since the entire plot hinged on his search to reclaim what had been taken from him.

For all its ambition, the Shadow King version of the film eventually hit a wall, and McKenna was candid about why it fell apart during the writers’ room process. He said the team realized that “this isn’t very satisfying because just having a disembodied voice the entire time and not having a face-to-face villain, you hit a wall at a certain point and you can’t explore who the character is,” a comment he made during that same Bulwark conversation.

McKenna added that so much of what makes Spider-Man’s stories work comes from Peter’s direct connection to his villains, something a faceless antagonist simply could not deliver. That realization reportedly pushed the writers away from Shadow King and eventually toward Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, whose introduction let the film keep its body-hopping mystery hook while still giving Peter someone tangible to confront by the third act.

It's about to be a Brand New Day. Get tickets now. #SpiderManBrandNewDay is in theatres July 31. pic.twitter.com/rJeJHEfdYV

— Spider-Man Movie (@SpiderManMovie) July 21, 2026

Shadow King was not the only name discarded along the way. McKenna has also detailed earlier plans built around Kraven the Hunter, including a concept where the classic Spider-Man villain would have turned New York into a citywide trap for Peter, along with a version involving Chameleon before that character’s own film rights conflicts ruled him out too. Each idea got pulled off the table for a different reason, whether it was overlapping film rights with Sony’s slate or, in Shadow King’s case, a structural problem the writers couldn’t solve.

Part of what makes the Shadow King reveal so surprising is that the character has essentially no history with Spider-Man in the comics at all, since he exists almost entirely within X-Men lore as a recurring foe for Charles Xavier and his students. Building an MCU Spider-Man film around him would have marked an unusually deep cut even by the standards of a franchise that has leaned hard into using multiversal connections to justify unexpected crossovers.

It also would have meant leaning even further into psychological horror territory than ‘Brand New Day’ ultimately did, given that Shadow King’s comic book history includes possessing other characters and manipulating their minds from the shadows. Some of that DNA appears to have survived into the finished film anyway, since Jean Grey’s own powers in ‘Brand New Day’ still involve possessing other people’s bodies, suggesting the Shadow King concept left more of a fingerprint on the final script than its outright cancellation might suggest.

For now, ‘Brand New Day’ remains in theaters riding a wave of record setting box office numbers, and Shadow King remains one more name on the growing list of villains, alongside Kraven and Chameleon, who never made it to the screen,

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments.