After months of hype and speculation, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is here, and with it the revelation of Sadie Sink’s role in the film, which has been under wraps since she was first cast. Most of the guesses focused, with perhaps literal-minded fervor, on her famous red hair. Could she be positioned as the “real” Mary Jane Watson, after three movies where it was presumed that Zendaya’s MJ (full name: Michelle Jones-Watson) was more or less a new version of that character? Could her MJ hail from an alternate universe, like the one that allowed multiple Spider-Men to meet in Spider-Man: No Way Home? Or was Sink playing a certain character from the X-Men side of the Marvel Universe, with those characters having been returned to the purview of the MCU following Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox?
**Spoilers for Spider-man: Brand New Day, now in theaters, ahead**
Unfortunately, my daughter’s inspired guess that maybe Sink was playing the mutant Firestar –—technically an X-Men character, but actually created for the old cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends — did not come to pass. Around halfway through Brand New Day, the movie reveals that Sink’s shadowy character, who has been using a mysterious power to jump into strangers’ heads and briefly control them, remaining elusive to Spider-Man, is as many others had already presumed: Jean Grey, best known as a core member of the original X-Men.
This revelation has shades of Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, not just because it was repeatedly denied in the run-up to the release in hopes of surprising the audience, but because in the world of the movie, it’s not a revelation at all. In the current MCU timeline, the X-Men aren’t a thing, mutants exist but aren’t widely publicized, and Jean Grey is still just a teenage girl with enormous telepathic powers. Those unfamiliar with the character might not even scan that Marvel is introducing a major figure in a Spider-Man movie already packed with characters familiar from other movies and shows (Hulk, the Punisher, and Yelena from Thunderbolts all make appearances as well).
More casual fans might be confused: Hasn’t Jean Grey appeared in plenty of movies before? Why is she suddenly young now? The answer is yes, Jean Grey was depicted in the original trilogy of X-Men movies that helped kick off the superhero movie boom in the first place: X-Men (2000), X2 (2003), and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), where she’s played by Famke Janssen, already an adult when X-Men begins. Those movies establish a small core team of X-Men: Jean, her beau Cyclops (James Marsden), Storm (Halle Berry), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), with most of the other characters as students at the school run by Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). By the third film, the grown-ups are joined by Beast (Kelsey Grammer). But by that same movie, Jean has already died and come back to life as the Phoenix — a famous comics storyline where Jean comes back from the dead and eventually loses her mind and moral bearing, becoming Dark Phoenix.
This storyline was famously rushed and chintizified by a Brett Ratner-directed The Last Stand, and contributed to Fox feeling at ease with making X-Men: Days of Future Past, a time-travel story that fused the original X-Men cast with the prequel characters introduced in X-Men: First Class. The result seemed to be an avoidance of Jean’s death/Phoenix resurrection/re-demise; she appears alive and well at the end of Days of Future Past. (Janssen also appears in The Wolverine, set in the aftermath of The Last Stand, but she’s only a vision haunting Jackman’s Wolverine.)
The next time Jean Grey appeared in live-action form, she was closer to the age of Sink’s version in Brand New Day. X-Men: Apocalypse, set in the 1980s, continued the series on a prequel track by introducing younger versions of Jean, Cyclops, and others, who would presumably grow up to be the versions we know from the first films (though some of their life experiences would be altered). Here, Jean is played by Sophie Turner as a young telepath and student still growing into her powers. It’s a supporting part — Apocalypse already has leading roles for Xavier, his frenemy Magneto, and Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique — that tees up a bigger role in Dark Phoenix, which returns to the storyline that The Last Stand biffed.
Dark Phoenix got even worse reviews than Last Stand and bombed at the box office, making it the only main-line X-Men movie to do so. At this point, Disney’s purchase of Fox was looming anyway, and this 20-year series of X-Men movies was clearly on its way out. Deadpool & Wolverine offered a kinda-sorta sendoff for that universe, with a curtain call in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, which will feature several Fox-universe characters, who are not expected to jump over to the MCU (with the possibly exception of Jackman’s Wolverine, or a version of him. It’s complicated!).
The expectation with casting a well-known actor like Sink as Jean Grey is that she’ll continue on when Marvel Studios eventually makes its own X-Men movie, which has been much discussed for the past few years, and has a director (Thunderbolts’ Jake Schreier) and at least one other star (Samara Weaving has reportedly been cast as Jean’s rival telepath, Emma Frost) attached. While only a few of the earlier X-Men movies really focused on the group as a classic team, with more maverick-style individuals like Wolverine, Mystique, and Magneto often dominating the narrative, Sink as Grey lays the groundwork for a movie that will start from an ensemble of young heroes, with Charles Xavier as potentially more of a supporting character. (And if Frost is part of the crew, we must assume Cyclops’s casting is nigh.)
In the meantime: Is the best Jean Grey story in movies so far actually in a Spider-Man movie, just by default? Maybe. Dark Phoenix is a touch underrated; it’s a more dour X-Men movie than the rest, and doesn’t really do its famous source material justice, but it’s not as terrible as its reputation and features some strong acting from an overqualified cast. Turner, though, feels a little too buttoned-up to fully let loose her powers. Janssen was good in the role, but her Jean is relentlessly seen as an object of Wolverine’s affection, despite the fact that they never actually have anything close to a romantic relationship in those earlier movies. Sink brings a raw-nerve energy that feels both true to her persona from other shows and movies, and novel to a young version of Jean who has felt ostracized by her powers even in a world that accepts (some) superheroes. But this less formed version of Jean also makes it more backstory and prologue than full-fledged superhero (not least because she’s an antagonist for much of the film); we have yet to see Jean Grey as a more sustained lead of an X-Men story. For that, best to turn to the comics, or the animated series X-Men and its current revival X-Men ’97, where Jean gets just as much screen time as many other characters. (The original series also did the Dark Phoenix story, hewing closer to the comics than either movie version.)
In the meantime, let’s hope that Avengers: Doomsday, another crossover to end all crossovers, one that Janssen has pointedly noted did not employ her services, doesn’t drown out Jean Grey’s character yet again. One of Marvel’s most powerful and complex women deserves better than a cool supporting part in a Spider-Man movie.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.