Spider-Man Brand New Day: Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey is brilliant, but Marvel’s X-Men timeline is a mutating mess

Marvel fatigue might have set in, but when it comes to Spider-Man, there are still few laps left in the cinematic universe. Maybe, there are a few sweat trickles, but not quite yet, out of breath. Enough to hold a conversation.

Released four years after the previous instalment, Brand New Day is a noticeably more grounded and grittier entry, moving away from the cameo-heavy approach and the sprawling multiverse saga that looms over Marvel's storytelling. This time, Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is battling a new antagonist: A crippling sense of loneliness. For the web-slinging hero, who once had it all, in terms of powers, a nerdy friend, a girlfriend, a swanky mentor, Peter Parker continues to fight crime as Spider-Man, but in a world where nobody remembers him as the former, a repercussion from the end of Spider-Man No Way Home. He has lost enough; and Tom Holland expressively shows you the wounds that never heal.

 Loss and grief pervade through the film, continuing Marvel’s tradition of exploring the themes ever since Iron Man’s death in Endgame. And another person whose grief is bringing the entire city to its knees: Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey. She arrives as a telekinetic storm, inhabiting residents minds at will, seemingly tormenting Spider-Man, but her real mission is revealed: To find her equally powerful sister, Sara.

 And when she realises that she will never find her, in one of the most searing ways possible, her rage keeps the city in an iron-clad telekinetic clasp. Granted, in the typical Marvel-esque fashion, Spider-Man follows the legacy of the usual this-is-wrong-you-are-not-like-this-you-are-just-grieving, and immediately Jean Grey bends her desire to murder everyone in the city.

It's a compelling introduction to Jean Grey, but it also leaves behind one enormous question: where exactly does this version fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Will the real Jean Grey please stand up?

With the X-Men finally making their long-awaited arrival in the MCU, Brand New Day doesn't just introduce one of Marvel's most powerful mutants, it also muddies an already tangled timeline. Sadie Sink's teenage Jean Grey now exists in the same broader cinematic universe that is preparing to welcome back several familiar faces from the original X-Men films.

For audiences who have followed the mutant saga for more than two decades, that's where the confusion begins.

Jean Grey has already had two major live-action incarnations. Famke Janssen played the telepath in the original X-Men trilogy alongside Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman and James Marsden. She is reserved, compassionate and immensely powerful, and unfortunately, her story culminated in the tragic Dark Phoenix arc (butchered by the films, if one might say, the animations have done far more justice to the storylines).

The role was later rebooted with Sophie Turner portraying a younger Jean Grey in Fox's prequel films, including X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, another botched attempt at adapting one of Marvel Comics' most celebrated storylines.

Comic book context: The Dark Phoenix Saga remains one of Marvel's most searing, and complicated X-Men storylines. As the cosmic Phoenix Force fuses with a dying Jean Grey, it evolves into a force, being whose immense power threatens entire worlds. It turns dark and twisted, and later, Jean has to put up a fight to reclaim it.

And, despite its status on the page, neither live-action adaptation has fully captured its scale or emotional weight.

Now, however, Marvel is adding a third live-action Jean Grey to the mix.

That's where Brand New Day raises more questions than answers.

One obvious explanation is that this is simply the MCU's definitive Jean Grey, a fresh take that exists independently of Fox's X-Men films. But that's where the waters become murkier. Marvel has already confirmed the return of several Fox-era X-Men, including Patrick Stewart's Professor X and James Marsden's Cyclops, in Avengers: Doomsday. If those legacy characters continue to exist within the wider multiverse, where exactly does Sadie Sink's Jean Grey fit? Is she the MCU's primary Jean, a multiversal variant, or the beginning of an entirely new mutant timeline?

None of those questions are necessarily problems on their own. The MCU has spent years building towards a multiverse where multiple versions of the same character can coexist. But after Brand New Day deliberately scales back the multiversal spectacle in favour of a more grounded Spider-Man story, introducing another version of such a mutant inevitably risks reopening the same continuity maze that many fans had hoped Marvel was finally leaving behind.

Perhaps Doomsday will provide the missing pieces. Until then, Spider-Man's latest adventure doesn't just give audiences a new Jean Grey, it leaves them wondering which Jean Grey, and which X-Men timeline, they're supposed to be investing in.