Early ideas for Spider-Man: Brand New Day included alternate villains, a British alter ego, and several changes to avoid characters Sony ended up using in its own Spider-Universe films.
Speaking to The Bulwark, Spider-Man writer Chris McKenna revealed some of the story concepts discussed and then discarded during what sounds like a lengthy search for Brand New Day's plot. Most difficult, it seems, was a decision on who the movie's villain would be — with Jean Grey not finalized until September 2024, less than a year before the film began shooting.
That's despite years of work by McKenna and his co-writing partner Erik Summers, who together have penned all of Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies (plus Ant-Man and the Wasp, with forthcoming credits on both Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars).
As has been discussed previously, Brand New Day was always conceived as a smaller-scale movie following the multiversal multi-Spider-Men antics of No Way Home. But the idea of Peter Parker going through a kind of metamorphosis took time to be accepted, with the pitch initially being discarded.
"We went down some different roads," McKenna revealed. "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. And people were like 'woah this is great, where'd this come from?' Well, we pitched it to you a year and a half ago before we went down that other road!
"And I'm glad, maybe we had to do that to get back to the metamorphosis story, which I thought was the most simple, potent, cool idea. Someone who's resisting change going through one he couldn't control. Particularly with the MCU [version of the] character, as we never saw him get his powers."
What was that other story avenue McKenna and Summers explored? Here, McKenna says he "can't talk about" this in detail in case Marvel still wants to use some of its plot elements in future, but "there were similarities" to what Brand New Day eventually became.
"[Such as] him falling in with MJ, but she didn't know him," McKenna said. "So he had to have a persona he put on. At one point we had him putting on his British accent, so it would have been Tom's British accent, but Tom from Queens pretending he's British, as he'd run into MJ while Spider-Man and thought he now needed to disguise his voice." In this version of the story, Peter would have introduced himself to MJ as Ben Reilly — the name of a cloned version of Spider-Man from the comics.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/spider-man-brand-new-day-story-changed-repeatedly-as-sony-launched-those-terrible-villain-spinoff-films
