Spider-Man: Brand New Day Nearly Redeemed Iconic Marvel Villain After $62M Disaster

Spider-Man: Brand New Day almost swung into theaters with a different main villain.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is currently the biggest movie in the world, passing the $2 billion milestone. A huge part of that is due to how the cast of the Spider-Man movie brought back fan-favorite Marvel characters, as well as debuted massive new players that will surely be key to the future of the MCU. Among the latter was Sadie Sink's Jean Grey, who will be the star of Marvel Studios' upcoming X-Men movie. In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Jean was a mysterious threat for the majority of the film, but she was not the first choice for that role.

During an interview on The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast, Spider-Man: Brand New Day writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers revealed that their original idea for the main villain of the Spider-Man movie was the Chameleon. According to the writers, they were toying with the idea of having the classic Spider-Man villain mess with mind-control, which would be a new power for Dmitri Smerdyakov. However, the MCU team could not use the villain, as he had already been done in live-action recently in Sony's Spider-Man Universe. The Chameleon was played by Fred Hechinger in 2024's Kraven the Hunter. Check out the full quote below:

McKenna: "We were trying to think of a villain that would sort of fit that bill, and we were thinking, 'What's really a classic Spider-Man villain that no one has really done yet?' We were going... Chameleon? But, how do you do that? Well, they've done Skrulls...then we ended up on the idea of mind-control. What if Chameleon was using mind-control? But then, they had already used Dimitri, Kraven's half-brother, in Kraven [the Hunter], so it was like, ah, you can't do Chameleon."

The Chameleon made sense as the first main villain idea for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. With the film marking the start of a new chapter for Tom Holland's Peter Parker in the MCU, one that is more mature and street-level, stripping Spider-Man largely back to the basics, having the Chameleon, who was the first villain the Marvel hero ever fought in his solo comics, as the Chameleon debuted in The Amazing Spider-Man #1, back in 1963, would have been fitting. However, the Spider-Man villain's recent appearance in Kraven the Hunter took away that novelty factor.

Additionally, by giving mind-control powers to the Chameleon, who is known for being a shape-shifting villain, Spider-Man: Brand New Day might have angered part of the Spider-Man fanbase. Interestingly, this is not the only connection between Sony's Kraven the Hunter interfering with the MCU Spider-Man franchise's villain choices.

Spider-Man: No Way Home originally wanted to have Kraven as its main villain, as revealed by McKenna and Sommers in the MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios book, but the duo was told that they could not use him due to how Sony was already developing Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Kraven the Hunter movie. That SSU film ended up grossing just $62 million worldwide, with the Chameleon's powers only being fully unleashed at the end of the movie.

In the end, the choice to make Sink's Jean Grey Spider-Man: Brand New Day's main villain for the most part, with Tramell Tillman's William Metzger revealed as the true foe in the end, worked out well for the film and the larger MCU. Spider-Man: Brand New Day got a villain with formidable powers that had never before appeared in a live-action Spider-Man movie, while the MCU got to introduce its version of Jean Grey and plant the seeds for the X-Men movie and how powerful she is. The Chameleon being blocked did not negatively impact Spider-Man: Brand New Day.