The upcoming Marvel Studios film Spider-Man: Brand New Day went through repeated story changes during development, with writers cycling through alternate villains, a British alter ego for Peter Parker, and several discarded plotlines, according to screenwriter Chris McKenna. In an interview with The Bulwark, McKenna described a lengthy and often frustrating search for the film's narrative, complicated by Sony's parallel production of Spider-Man villain spinoff films.
McKenna, who co-wrote the film with longtime partner Erik Summers, said the decision on the movie's villain was not finalized until September 2024, less than a year before shooting began. The pair have written all of Tom Holland's Spider-Man films and also worked on Ant-Man and the Wasp, with upcoming credits on Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars.
Brand New Day was always conceived as a smaller-scale movie following the multiversal events of No Way Home. But the central idea of Peter Parker undergoing a metamorphosis took time to be accepted. McKenna said the pitch was initially discarded before the writers returned to it. «We went down some different roads,» he said. «We came back to — this was one of our original ideas, the idea of metamorphosis — that we went away from and then came back to it.» He described the concept as «the most simple, potent, cool idea. Someone who's resisting change going through one he couldn't control.»
One abandoned version would have placed Peter in South East Asia as a badass hero taking on local gangs, living on a boat and making his own web fluid. He would then receive a video message showing an imposter Spider-Man in New York charming fans. Peter would return to find the imposter using his web fluid and suit, and would hire Matt Murdock to fight the copyright claim, only to receive a cease and desist from the other man.
Another idea involved Peter falling ill and hallucinating a message from a talking bodega cat that told him to hunt down the Spider-Totems. He would wake in a hospital, where the vision was revealed as a dream caused by appendicitis. While hospitalized, he would miss paying rent, get evicted, and move in with two neighbors who would later be revealed as the villains Overkill and Boomerang.
McKenna also described a version in which Peter falls in with MJ, who does not know him, and adopts a persona to disguise his identity. At one point, he used his British accent, meaning Tom Holland's real accent, with Peter from Queens pretending to be British after running into MJ as Spider-Man. In that version, he introduced himself to MJ as Ben Reilly, the name of a cloned Spider-Man from the comics. McKenna said it took time to confirm Zendaya's return and the extent of her role, and the writers were keen not to quickly undo the ending of No Way Home. An early idea in which MJ says «I figured it out» was also scrapped.
The villain selection process was hampered by Sony's Spider Universe spinoffs, including Madame Web, Morbius, and Kraven. McKenna said the writers repeatedly found characters they wanted to use were already claimed by other projects. «We were eating each other's lunches,» he said. The Spot was planned as a villain for No Way Home until the writers learned the character would appear in Across the Spider-Verse. Kraven was also considered, with ideas including turning New York into a Home Alone-style trap for Spider-Man. «We were told Sony would never make a Kraven standalone movie,» McKenna said. «And then it was like a joke: Sony is making a standalone Kraven movie.» The shape-shifting villain Jean Grey was not the original choice, and other ideas included the Chameleon.
Several pitches were built around a «Die Hard with a Vengeance concept,» with Peter facing a street-level villain over the course of a single day. McKenna said he could not discuss one alternate story avenue in detail because Marvel may still use elements of it, but noted it had similarities to what Brand New Day eventually became.