Sadie Sink’s mystery role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is finally out in the open. About halfway through the film, her face is revealed and she is shown as Jean Grey, one of the original members of the X-Men.
That answer matters now because the movie is playing in theaters, ending months of speculation over Sink’s part in the MCU. It also pushes Jean into the center of a story that keeps circling back to New York City, where Spider-Man is chasing a new villain who can possess bystanders’ bodies if they are less than 33 feet away.
Jean does not arrive like a standard superhero cameo. She uses her abilities to jump between people’s minds and tries to break into the headquarters for the Department of Damage Control, first by taking over a possessed Scorpion played by Michael Mando and then by controlling Bruce Banner, played by Mark Ruffalo, long enough to remove the device that keeps him from turning into the Hulk. Spider-Man later teams up with Jon Bernthal’s Punisher to stop the Hulk from tearing up the Damage Control skyscraper.
The movie keeps making clear that Jean is powerful, but it never makes her the true source of the threat. That role belongs to Damage Control. Jean breaks into the secret vault and is tranquilized and taken by Damage Control CEO Bill Metzger, after which Metzger and his team hold her hostage and run tests on her. The shift gives the story its edge: the mutant is the weapon, but the organization behind the walls is the one doing the damage.
A flashback explains why Jean is driven so hard. Her older sister, Sara, could also possess people’s minds, and Damage Control officers abducted her in a park. Sara possessed Jean’s mind to run away and save her younger sister, but she later died while being tested on by Damage Control. Jean then realizes she is locked in the same cell that held Sara, and her response is to create a gigantic psychic bubble that freezes nearly everyone in New York City.
Spider-Man eventually reasons with Jean and convinces her to drop her vendetta against Damage Control. Even then, the movie does not give her a neat farewell. While Spider-Man is shot, Jean keeps him alive with her powers before leaving before he can say goodbye. In the final moments, she is seen riding a bus out of the city, and the film leaves it hanging whether she is heading upstate to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester.
That ending does two jobs at once. It closes the book on the casting mystery that has followed Sink for months and plants Jean Grey inside the MCU with a clear path toward future X-Men stories, even if the film does not spell out exactly where she is going next.
