Sadie Sink's role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day remains a mystery. Despite repeated rumours that she's playing the MCU's Jean Grey, names like Shathra, Mayday Parker, and even Firestar have been thrown around at one time or another.
Junket press have only seen the first 35 minutes of the movie, so it likely won't be until the review embargo lifts that spoilers begin circulating (the trades notoriously spoiled Harry Styles' Eternals cameo in reviews). Could all this secrecy and the high expectations of fans come back to bite the movie? After all, no matter who Sink plays in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, some people will inevitably be disappointed.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Spider-Man: Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton said he's aware that keeping the Stranger Things alum's character under wraps could upset fans, but stands by the decision.
"If people are gonna get mad, I can’t control that! I wish everything was a secret," he shared. "Some people wanna know everything, and some people don’t. There are certain people like me — if I know I’m gonna watch a movie, I try not to even watch the trailers."
"But you’ll see when you watch the movie that there’s a very real reason not to tell people who Sadie Sink is playing," he added, confirming that there's a story-based reason for the continued secrecy. "And I don’t think you’ll get mad at it. I think you’ll be like, 'Oh, I’m glad I didn’t know that.'"
Cretton later talked in detail about Spider-Man: Brand New Day's opening montage, which sees Peter Parker face off with several familiar villains. According to the filmmaker, the idea behind it is to show audiences what Spidey has been doing since 2021's Spider-Man: Brand New Day. However, shooting it proved a challenge.
"Montages suck! Every shot is not just a new setup, it’s a new location. It’s sometimes a new time period. So they suck to shoot, but they’re really fun to watch. We’re telling the story of what Peter Parker did over the four years that his friends are at school. And who we were going to include was less of a concern and more what we were trying to show is him cleaning up the city, and which [book] covers kind of helped us tell that story."
"And what was fun, was choosing the covers that allowed us to imagine what could’ve happened a little bit before or a little bit after that frame that we’re all used to seeing."
"[Tom's] ability to control his body to get into the pose of a cover — we’d look at the cover, and some of the covers are not necessarily something that the human body can get into, the way that these poses are. He was able to look at it and, in just a few takes, he would go and do it, and we’d analyze what his body was doing, and he’d say, “Oh, I think I can, yeah, I think I can do it better,” and he’d go back in. It was pretty amazing to watch."
Asked about Tom Holland's comments that the "Brand New Day" title comes into play in "the final frame of the movie," Cretton replied, "The title, to me, does reflect where he ends up. The journey of this movie is about searching for that feeling of a brand-new day. I don’t think he really has that feeling in the beginning of this movie. And I do feel like that’s the theme of this film."
Before he shot the upcoming Spider-Man movie, Cretton helmed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Wonder Man for Marvel Studios. In other interviews, he's said that work on Season 2 of the latter is underway, but what of Shang-Chi 2?
"I also would love to see Shang-Chi 2," he told the site. "I was talking to Dave Callaham, our writer, about it just a few weeks ago, so fingers crossed."
In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it's a Brand New Day for Peter Parker. Fighting crime full-time as Spider-Man in a world that doesn’t remember him—and the pressure of seeing his old friends move on without him—sparks a change in Peter he may not have the power to control.
But that transformation might also be the only thing that can stop a shocking new threat to the city and those he loves - a powerful villain no one can even see. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker, but he hasn’t forgotten them.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31.