‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Almost Went a Completely Different Direction with Its Villain, and Fans Are Stunned

Marvel Studios has spent years carefully rebuilding its villain roster for the Spider-Man franchise, especially after ‘No Way Home’ briefly reunited fans with legacy antagonists before sending them back to their own timelines. Every new installment since has faced the challenge of finding a threat that feels fresh rather than recycled.

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘ took a bold swing by making its central antagonist someone entirely unexpected, a decision that surprised even longtime comic readers. But the path to that choice apparently involved far more experimentation behind the scenes than most fans realized.

According to Erik Sommers, the film went through multiple versions of its villain during pre-production, including one identity that ultimately didn’t make the cut: The Chameleon. Feige revealed during a talk at USC that the shapeshifting villain was considered before the studio pivoted toward a different direction entirely.

Chameleon, one of Spider-Man’s oldest comic book adversaries dating back to his very first appearance in the character’s original 1963 comic run, had already made a live-action debut of sorts in 2024’s ‘Kraven the Hunter,’ where Fred Hechinger played the role. That prior film’s ending even teased a potential rivalry between Kraven and Chameleon, but the project’s underwhelming reception appears to have factored into Marvel’s decision not to revisit the character so soon in ‘Brand New Day.’

Instead, the studio ultimately landed on Jean Grey, played by Sadie Sink, as the film’s true villain, a choice that doubled as a soft launch for the X-Men into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe. Feige described the process as going through “one version of the bad guy, then another version of the bad guy” before settling on the character that made it to screen.

Writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who worked on the previous MCU Spider-Man trilogy, explained that mind control had always been part of the story, but the team simply hadn’t found the right character to anchor that concept. They noted that Jean Grey’s importance to the broader mutant storyline gave them far more flexibility to develop and eventually redeem the character by the film’s conclusion.

The choice to sideline a traditional Spider-Man villain in favor of an X-Men figure represents a notable shift for the franchise, and it also meant Peter Parker operated without his usual on-screen mentor for the first time in the MCU’s Spider-Man trilogy. That absence, paired with the unconventional villain choice, gave ‘Brand New Day’ a noticeably different tone from its predecessors.

Chameleon’s absence hasn’t stopped fans from hoping the character eventually gets his proper live-action showcase, especially given his deep roots in Spider-Man’s comic book history and his underused big-screen appearances so far. For now, though, Marvel appears to be saving him for a future project rather than tying his reintroduction to the fallout of ‘Kraven the Hunter.’

With ‘Brand New Day’ already breaking box office records and reestablishing Spider-Man’s place in the MCU’s larger mutant storylines, the villain swap looks to have paid off creatively as well as commercially. Whether Chameleon eventually gets his moment in a future Spider-Man film remains to be seen, but the door is clearly still open.

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