‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Fans Are Losing It over This Sadie Sink and Tom Holland Moment You Might Have Missed

Marvel has spent years teasing the eventual arrival of mutants into the MCU proper, and ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘ just delivered one of the biggest confirmations yet. The record-breaking film hit theaters worldwide with a marketing campaign that carefully guarded one major secret, and now that the movie is out, fans are dissecting every frame of its emotional final act.

Tom Holland returns as Peter Parker in the latest installment of Sony and Marvel’s web-slinging saga, this time facing off against a mysterious new threat capable of possessing bystanders within 33 feet. That villain turns out to be Sadie Sink, the former ‘Stranger Things’ star, whose identity remains hidden for roughly the first half of the film before a major reveal changes the entire trajectory of the story.

Sadie Sink’s character Jean Grey saves Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ by using her telepathic powers to keep him alive after he takes a fatal bullet meant for her, and fans have been picking apart the sequence ever since. The scene unfolds after Frank Castle, also known as the Punisher, lines up a sniper shot from miles away in an attempt to break Jean’s psychic hold over a crowd of civilians she had been using her abilities on.

Sensing the incoming bullet with his Spider-Sense, Peter shields Jean at the last second and takes the gunshot himself, critically wounding him in the process. As he bleeds out, Jean uses her telepathic abilities to keep him alive before Frank rushes him to a nearby hospital for emergency surgery, a moment the film lingers on through a shot of Jean breathing heavily before immediately cutting to Peter opening his eyes and beginning his recovery.

That sequencing has fueled online theories that Jean did far more than simply stand by during Peter’s recovery. According to fans dissecting the scene, Sink’s Jean Grey actively entered Peter’s mind and used her telepathic powers to keep his breathing going until his body could recover on its own, essentially willing him back to consciousness through sheer psychic force. Fans believe that Jean Grey’s selfless act of keeping Peter alive demonstrates a pure and quietly devastating bond between the two characters, one built entirely through a handful of scenes late in the film.

That bond is deepened earlier in the same sequence, when Jean probes Peter’s mind while trying to break into the headquarters of the Department of Damage Control and instead lives through one of his most tender memories, a recollection of his late Aunt May. It’s that unexpected intimacy, paired with her decision to save his life rather than simply disappear once her cover was blown, that has given the moment such staying power with audiences parsing the film’s final act.

Jean doesn’t stick around for a proper goodbye once Peter regains consciousness. She’s last seen slipping away and boarding a bus toward an undisclosed destination, with the film’s closing shot showing fall foliage that many have read as pointing toward Westchester, the traditional home of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in X-Men lore. The movie never once uses the words X-Men or mutant, letting the imagery do all the storytelling instead.

Sink’s casting marks the most significant X-Men character introduction into the MCU to date, following smaller nods like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X cameo in ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ and Kelsey Grammer’s Beast in ‘The Marvels’. She becomes the third live-action performer to play Jean Grey, following Famke Janssen in Fox’s original trilogy and Sophie Turner in the more recent prequel films, and the first to do so under Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios’ banner.

The film’s box office numbers have matched the size of its ambitions, with ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ pulling in $355 million domestically during its opening weekend, nearly breaking ‘Avengers: Endgame’s 2019 record.

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