.jfif)
Iteration is part of the Marvel Studios process, and ultimately, Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey became the central antagonist of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” But screenwriter Chris McKenna says the filmmakers considered several very different Marvel villains before landing there, including Kraven, Chameleon, and Shadow King—and the process was complicated by other Spider-Man projects repeatedly claiming characters they wanted to use.
Speaking on The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood, McKenna first pointed back to “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” where he and co-writer Erik Sommers ran into exactly that problem with Spot.
“We would break a story for two weeks, and we’d have Spot as our villain in ‘No Way Home,’” McKenna said. “And then we’d find out, ‘Oh, sorry, I just read the new outline for “Across the Spider-Verse” and Spot’s in it. So you can’t have that.’”
Kraven became their fallback because Sony had told them it wasn’t planning a standalone movie about the character.
“When we lost Spot, it was like, ‘Well, at least we have Kraven,’” McKenna recalled. “We were told they were never gonna make a standalone Kraven movie, so we always had Kraven, and we had fun ways to get into the Kraven character.”
Their version would have turned New York into an elaborate death trap for Peter Parker.
“Kraven, like, turning New York City into, like, a ‘Home Alone’ trap for Spider-Man, where he’s set up booby traps everywhere, and you get a big star, like, almost just a laconic character—Kraven, who’s just hunting down Peter Parker,” McKenna said. “He could even be a tertiary villain. He could be either hired by someone, maybe don’t even have to make him the centerpiece villain, but just someone who’s stalking him the entire movie.”
“Then we found out, ‘Oh no, actually, in “Kraven,” his brother, Sergei, who’s Chameleon in the comic books—or his half-brother—is in “Kraven,” so it can’t be Chameleon,’” McKenna recalled.
Then Sony changed course. “It was a joke,” McKenna said. “It was like, ‘Oh no, Sony’s making a standalone Kraven movie. You’ve got to be kidding me.’”
When development later turned to “Brand New Day,” Kraven came up again as McKenna and Sommers searched for a classic Spider-Man villain they hadn’t previously used.
“I remember I was just on the phone with Sommers going, ‘Okay, is there any way to do Kraven? Is there any way to—God damn it—is there any way to do Chameleon? How do we do Chameleon?’”
Chameleon briefly looked promising, but the writers wanted something beyond his traditional disguise gimmick.
“How do we make them fresh?” McKenna said. “Obviously, we’re not going to do a rubber mask, but the MCU had already done shape-shifting with the Skrulls. Is there any way to do it? And then we’re thinking, telepathy? Could you do it where someone is basically taking people, you know, possessing people? So we got excited by that. We’re like, ‘Oh, like [the Denzel Washington ’90s film] ‘Fallen.’”
But Chameleon had already appeared in “Kraven the Hunter.” “Then we found out, ‘Oh no, actually, in “Kraven,” his brother, Sergei, who’s Chameleon in the comic books—or his half-brother—is in “Kraven,” so it can’t be Chameleon,’” McKenna recalled.
The telepathy idea survived, however, and eventually led them to Shadow King, the powerful psychic X-Men villain most commonly associated with Amahl Farouk and Professor X, and previously adapted in FX’s “Legion.”
“We started thinking, ‘Oh, well, what if it was Shadow King from the comics?’” McKenna said. “Who’s a really, really cool villain, who is a telepath that first gets discovered in the comics by Charles Xavier.”
The idea would have sent Peter chasing an almost ghost-like enemy through New York.
“Him chasing a disembodied voice through New York, we thought was really cool,” McKenna explained. “Particularly if he first can see the villain jumping from body to body and sensing it with his Spider-Sense. But then if his Spider-Sense gets out of whack, then he’s on his heels, and then he’s blind to this villain.”
The complication was that introducing a telepath pushed the Sony-controlled Spider-Man movie directly into Marvel’s emerging mutant plans. “Once you go down the telepathy route, though, you’re in mutant territory, which is instantly tricky,” McKenna said. “We backed into what I did not know was going to be a tricky situation, which is, oh, you’re not creating a Sony-owned, Sony-controlled villain anymore. If you’re doing a telepath who might be a mutant, you’re now in Marvel’s sandbox.”
Marvel allowed them to pursue the Shadow King concept—but only loosely. “Marvel was like, ‘We’re still trying to figure out what we’re doing with the mutants. Don’t call him Shadow King. Don’t call him Farouk,’” McKenna said. “We had a whole story where he’s chasing someone who is the Shadow King, but we never call him the Shadow King.”
They eventually wrote an entire draft around the idea.
“We wrote a whole draft like that, which was, you didn’t even see this character because, à la Shadow King, he’s trying to find his body,” McKenna said. “His body basically had been taken from him and hidden somewhere in New York City a long time ago by people who recognized that this guy was really dangerous.”
The lack of a physical antagonist eventually became the problem. “This isn’t very satisfying because just having a disembodied voice the entire time and not having a face-to-face villain, you kind of hit a wall at a certain point,” McKenna said. “So much of Spider-Man’s stories are so great because of his connection with the villain.”
Then, in September 2024, McKenna finally got the call that changed the movie.
“I got a call from the producer, and she said, ‘We got Jean Grey.’ It was like, ‘Oh, thank God,’” he recalled. “Obviously a great character, but just having a specific character that we could then actually start building a story around.”
Jean Grey still came with restrictions because Marvel hadn’t formally unveiled mutants in the MCU yet.
“One of the things that you don’t hear in the movie is you never hear the term ‘mutant’ in it because that has not been unveiled in the MCU yet,” McKenna said. “We were walking that line.” [editor’s note: not totally true: the term “mutant” was introduced in the “Ms. Marvel” TV series, but the thinking there is probably it’s a show not everyone watched, not a movie]
“Them allowing us to use Jean Grey was what completely unlocked the villain plot,” he added. “Telepath, mystery disembodied voice, as a sort of mad bomber running amok is really great. But at a certain point, basically midpoint, you’ve got to start learning more about the villain.”
.png)
0 Comments