SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Timeline Explained

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is finally here, and as expected, it's a fresh start for Spider-Man, but it also has major implications for the broader MCU. Let's go through it all. First, I'll recap the movie, then explain that postredit scene, where this movie fits into the MCU timeline, and what it means for the future of the MCU. Needless to say, spoilers ahead for everything MCU up to and including Brand New Day. No Way Home ended with Doctor Strange casting a spell to make the entire world forget Peter Parker. That was the only way to stop a prior spell gone wrong from opening the door to countless multiversal invaders. On the bright side, that means Spider-Man's secret identity is safe again. On the less bright side, it means Peter Parker is completely, utterly alone. Aunt May is dead. His best friend Ned has no memory of ever meeting or knowing him. Same with Peter's girlfriend MJ. Same with everyone else. Over the next four years, nothing changes except with Spider-Man free from the burdens of a social life and Peter Parker responsibilities. The hero is more effective than ever. Working with a cop, Detective DeWolf, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man has facilitated the arrest of so many notorious criminals. Tombstone, Scorpion, even the superpowered ninja group, The Hand. With his help, New York City crime rates are lower than ever. It seems Peter Parker's solitude makes him more effective as a hero. It makes things simpler, gives him only one thing to worry about, stopping crime. But soon, things get complicated. There's a new villain in New York City. Someone with the ability to possess other people. Hop from one body to another. The only one who can sense her and the only one capable of resisting possession seems to be Spider-Man. Perhaps another miracle of his Peter tingle or spider sense. What is the villain after? Yolena Bova aka the Black Widow of the new Avengers provides some intel. This villain has been attacking the Department of Damage Control in search of something called V-Max. So, Peter pays the DODC a visit where he sees some interesting things. like members of the hand walking the halls. Bill Mezer of the DODC explains how that's what they do here. Not lock villains away, but instead, when possible, redirect their abilities and technologies for good. The Hand works for the DoD now. Mezer asks for Peter's help to stop the body hopper, but he cannot divulge what she's actually after. That's classified. Soon, another complication. Peter sees Ned. Loneliness and curiosity get the better of Peter and he follows his old friend home. Ned and MJ are throwing a housewarming party, allowing Peter to blend in among the partygoers. Speaking to Ned and MJ proves again that they truly have no memory of him. And seeing MJ with a boyfriend provides another dose of heartbreak. It breaks Peter enough that the careful balancing act within his mutated biology is disturbed. For years, he's let his human Peter Parker side wither. Now, the arachnid side starts to take over. His senses are further heightened. His reflexes even faster, and his body starts to produce organic webs ones Peter 2 had. It's all scary, but maybe not such a bad thing. Maybe it'll make him an even better hero. Except it also makes him more aggressive and less careful. When the body hopper possesses Scorpion, Spider-Man emphasis on Spider subdues him, but in the process nearly gets an officer killed by carelessly tossing a police cruiser. Next time his arachnid side takes over, Peter might actually get someone killed. So he seeks out someone who used to know him but like everyone else no longer does. Someone who has experience suppressing mutation. Dr. Bruce Banner, a scientist who would be Hulk except he developed an inhibitor that stops his gamma radiated alter ego from manifesting. Picking his brain gives Peter a few ideas. Perhaps he could build his own inhibitor. More than that, perhaps he could build a universal inhibitor that could stop anyone with powers, including the body hopper. He builds a prototype, but can't stop it from overheating. And bigger problems, the body hopper figures out Spider-Man's identity. She gets into Peter's apartment and finds a letter he wrote, but never gave to MJ. One confessing everything about the spell that made her forget and what they once meant to each other. Peter rushes to MJ to bring her somewhere safe. And it's a miracle. She remembers him. They kiss and not a miracle after all. The body hopper got to MJ first. She's merely puppeting MJ to taunt Peter. Next, she puppets MJ right off the roof. Spider-Man manages to catch her and catch a glimpse of the body hopper before she escapes. The real MJ wakes up in Spider-Man's arms, and this time he brings her somewhere truly safe. A hideout belonging to Frank Castle, aka the Punisher. Fighting crime in New York City, it was inevitable Peter would cross paths with him. And surprisingly, despite their diametrically opposed approaches to the gig, they hit it off. And after Spider-Man saved his life, Punisher owes him a favor. At least that's how Spider-Man tells it. They lie low in the hideout and Spider-Man shares what he found out. Scanning the body hopper's face, he identified her. She wasn't on anybody's radar until a couple of months ago. Before that, she was an anonymous kid who spent years in and out of foster care. Now, she's classified as a dangerous telepath. Her name, Jean Gray. While they hide, Peter works on the inhibitor and with MJ's help figures out how to stop the overheating problem. He puts on his own inhibitor to ensure he maintains that delicate human arachnid balance and prepares the universal inhibitor that will stop Gene. The next time she attacks the DODC, Spider-Man is ready. Except it won't be easy because Gan has a Hulk. She's body hopped into Banner, but despite that massive green obstacle, with Punisher's help, Spider-Man gets the inhibitor on her and it works. Her powers are entirely subdued. Mezer tranks her and takes her into custody, but before passing out, she whispers a name, Sarah. Spider-Man asks Mezer about it. He explains that before they stopped her, Jean got into his mind for a second. Sarah was someone important to Mezer who recently passed. Back at Punisher's hideout, Spider-Man finds MJ holding a letter, the one he wrote explaining the spell. She found it, so that's it. Now she knows the truth. But knowing it is different than feeling it. Peter Parker is still no one to her, let alone someone she loves. With Gene locked up and no longer a threat, he takes MJ home, where she invites him to come up and see Ned, who naturally geeks out at meeting Spider-Man, but has no memory of being his best friend or guy in the chair. When Ned is out of the room, Peter apologizes to MJ for kissing her while she was possessed. MJ has no memory of it, which means Mezer could not have remembered Jean entering his own mind. He was lying about that. Peter calls Black Widow again. She digs into the name Sarah and figures out who it really is. Jean's sister. Sarah Gray was captured by the DODC and experimented on. That's what Gan has been after all this time. She just wanted to rescue her sister. Now Gan is the one locked up in a DODC facility, and they waste no time experimenting on her in the hopes of replicating her powers. In that facility under their mental and physical torture, Gene looks up and sees V-Max, a label on the vent. Ventmax, except the label has worn and torn, so the E N and T are mostly faded, leaving only V-Max, a meaningless word, except that it's one of the last things Sarah saw before she died. During the experiments, she called out and across an impossible distance, Gan received her telepathic message. V-Max, Sarah's mental death scream. Days ago, extreme stress unleashed Peter's arachnid side. Now it unleashes Jean's own powers. Mezer and the other DoDC agents were keeping a safe distance. Outside Jean's observed 33 ft body hopping limit, but with her powers unleashed, her range has increased considerably. Everyone in the DODC facility and a huge chunk of Manhattan are frozen in place, except Peter Parker. He gets to Gene and tells her that he's sorry. He didn't know about her sister. He was wrong to help the DODC capture her. Gan fights him by possessing ninjas of the hand and DODC agents armed with guns specially designed to subdue Spider-Man's webs. Yes, Gene reveals the DODC has a whole task force ready just in case Spider-Man ever gets out of line. They are monsters, but it's okay. She's going to kill the monster in charge, Mezer. To stop the ninjas, Spider-Man realizes what he has to do. become more spider than man. He removes his inhibitor and with his own powers unleashed, reaches Gan. He tries to reason with her, stop her from giving into rage and becoming a murderer. She doesn't listen, and she warns Peter that yes, she couldn't enter his mind before, but maybe she can now. And he lets her in. That's how she meets Aunt May, or at least the memory of her. Jean listens to words May said years ago. They were meant for Peter, but he and Gan are alike in many ways. So May's words are just as meaningful to her. May tells Gan how scary things are going to get having these powers, how lonely they're going to get, and how because you are special, people will do dark, monstrous things to you. But the people who love you don't love you for those powers. They love you for you. May told Peter and now Jean to remember that even when it feels like you're totally alone. That is your deepest responsibility. Never forget that no matter how powerful you become. Peter tells Gene that he knows from experience you can't do this alone. And she isn't alone because now she has him. It's around then Frank takes his shot. The city was in peril, lives at stake. He couldn't pin all their hopes on Spider-Man reasoning with a telepath. So, just outside Jean's telepathic range, Punisher got her in his sights and now pulls the trigger. Spider sense gives Peter the edge he needs to save her by taking the bullet in her place. He bleeds out on the floor while telling her to run before they find her. He should have died. Except Jean is a powerful telepath. She keeps Peter alive long enough that when the doctors take over, it isn't hopeless. Only then does she disappear, getting on a bus out of the city to who knows where. Peter wakes up on a hospital bed with Frank watching over him. Frank gives a tearful apology and Spider-Man laughs. He got to see the Punisher cry. Finally, Frank puts on Spider-Man's mask to play a decoy while Peter leaves the hospital anonymously past a crowd cheering for Spider-Man's recovery. Peter doesn't feel so alone anymore, and he promises May he's going to keep it that way. The next time he bumps into Ned, not as Spider-Man, but as Peter Parker, he shakes his hand, their secret handshake from when they were best friends. Ned remembers it, and that's where the movie ends. Also worth noting, Peter introduces himself as Peter after MJ earlier called Spider-Man Peter. So Ned might also be putting two and two together now. So given the special handshake, does Ned now remember Peter? It isn't the first hint in the movie that things like muscle memory can survive Doctor Strange's spell. We also see MJ absent-mindedly playing with the Black Dalia necklace Peter gave her in Far From Home. It might be nothing more than that muscle memory is different from the sorts of memories that got erased by the spell. Maybe if Peter tells Ned the truth about their shared history, that handshake will just be one piece of evidence that it's true. At the same time, maybe that muscle memory is a hint that the rest of their memory is still in there somewhere and could be unlocked. Only time will tell. That's where the movie ends, but as always, you've got to stick around until after the credits. This one requires some explanation. One thing this movie reveals is that Ned is still a huge Spider-Man fanboy. So much so, he actually built an app to track the hero's whereabouts. This postredit scene shows the tracker in action. It shows that Spider-Man seems to have disappeared or at least disappeared from Earth. Soon it tracks him down to somewhere in space. Then a familiar refrain. Spider-Man will return. What does it mean? It's likely a small indication of where things are heading for the web head in the upcoming Avengers Doomsday and Avengers Secret Wars. From the comics, we have a pretty good idea what it's hinting at. So, I'll give a quasi spoiler warning here if you don't want to know anything about the comics these movies are taking inspiration from. I say quasi spoiler because these adaptations are always pretty loose, borrowing some major events but changing a lot of the details, but that's your fair warning. And now let's go into a little of what happened in the Secret Wars comic event. There have been multiple events with that name, but from what we know, the Russo brothers are largely taking inspiration from Hickman's 2015 run. Very broadly, the multiverse collapses due to incursions, but Dr. Doom manages to preserve fragments of destroyed realities, stitching them together into a patchwork planet called Battle World, where he rules as a god. So, that gives you an idea of the multiversal shenanigans we may be in for in Secret Wars. Imagine a new world stitched together from pieces of the Fox X-Men universe, Sam Ramy's Spider-Man universe, the Fantastic 4's universe, and of course, Earth 616, where most of the MCU has taken place. I assume this postredit scene is hinting at the idea that Spider-Man has left Earth and is now on Battle World. It's a little confusing because if we're following the events laid out in the comics, the multiverse should be destroyed. So, this app and Earth shouldn't exist. And even if they do, the app is based on reported sightings. So, who exactly is reporting these sightings from the stars? At the same time, I don't know that it's meant to be taken so literally, more just a fun way to use Ned's app to tell us Spider-Man is going somewhere far away without actually showing any footage. It's also possible they'll borrow more from the 1984 Secret Wars event where the multiverse is not destroyed, but various villains and heroes, including Spider-Man, are summoned off planet to Battle World, which in the 1984 version was a patchwork of Planet Fragments rather than a patchwork of alternate realities. However, I think that's unlikely considering this is the Multiverse Saga, not the Planet Saga. And of course, Multiverse of Madness already warned us about incursions, so all the pieces are there for Secret Wars. In any case, the fact that they're hinting towards Spider-Man heading to Battle World also tells me that we likely won't see him in Doomsday, but he'll join in the fun in Secret Wars once Battle World is presumably a thing. Also, not a surprise given Tom Holland wasn't in the Chairwatch cast announcement and isn't in any of the marketing for Doomsday. Now, let's talk timeline. When exactly does Brand New Day take place in relation to recent and upcoming MCU outings? No Way Home took place in 2024. This movie being 4 years later puts it in 2028 after the events of Thunderbolts asterisk the New Avengers which took place in 2027. Elena even references the new Avengers in her conversation with Peter. So they're an established group by this point. But how about the Thunderbolts postredit scene featuring the arrival of the Fantastic 4 in Earth 616? The main events of that movie seem to take place in fall 2027. So the postredit scene shown to be 14 months later likely occurs in late 2028 after the events of Brand New Day. Assuming that scene leads into Doomsday lends more credence to that placement because if Doomsday stuff was happening, Yolena would presumably be too busy to meet Peter in a hot tub. So, put simply, Brand New Day takes place after the main events of Thunderbolts, but likely before the Thunderbolts postredit scene. How about in relation to Fantastic 4? That gets wonky because Fantastic 4 takes place in a different universe, Earth 828, where it's currently the 1960s. But assuming time passes at the same rate in both universes. It just so happens 616 is ahead by about 60 years, then we can say that the main events of Fantastic 4 likely take place about four years prior to Brand New Day. That's based on more interpretation and assumptions. The Fantastic 4 postredits takes place four years after the main events of the movie and features Doom with his mask off in front of Franklin. Assuming that somehow leads to them coming to 616 in the Thunderbolts postredit scene, which leads into Doomsday, then it's similar to the logic we used before. Brand New Day is after the main events of Fantastic 4 and Thunderbolts, but prior to both movies postredit scenes and prior to Avengers Doomsday. So, we have a good idea where Brand New Day sits on the timeline. Now, what does it tell us about where that timeline is heading? Feige has made no secret that after the Multiverse saga, it's all about the X-Men. In fact, it seems like a safe bet the mutant saga is up next. And this movie plants a lot of seeds for it, including the obvious one. It introduces to the MCU one of the most famous mutant telepaths, Gan Gray, now played by Sadi Sink. Though she is not the first mutant we've met, Neymar and Miss Marvel are also confirmed mutants. In fact, when Miss Marvel's mutation is discovered in her DNA, we even hear a little piece of the animated X-Men theme song. Of course, in Multiverse of Madness, we met an Xavier variant, and Deadpool even paid Earth 616 a visit, but Neymar, Miss Marvel, and now Gan Gray are the only confirmed mutants we've seen who are native to the MCU's Earth 616. So far, there's been no mention of the X-Men on that Earth. So, either they've done a great job staying hidden, they don't exist yet, or they're just in the early stages of forming. We know that Jake Shrier, director of Thunderbolts, is helming an X-Men movie to release after Secret Wars. We've even heard that Samara Weaving has been cast as Emma Frost, so they are for sure coming at the end of Brand New Day. Gan Gray is on the bus, and I wouldn't be shocked if that road leads somehow to Xavier. Maybe we'll find out. She heard rumors about a place safe for mutants. Perhaps some kind of school for gifted children. We also have not heard mutants singled out as a specific threat yet. Gan Gray was seen as a dangerous telepath by the DODC. And the word mutation is used a few times, but there were no lines like she's just one mutant, but there are more out there just like her. mutations appearing in DNA, turning ordinary people extraordinary, which doesn't seem like a big deal in the MCU considering how many people are already out there with powers, but it's probably a lot scarier when it's happening randomly but frequently to young people still figuring themselves out, especially when they can be singled out as different from ordinary humans down to their very DNA. That also makes them easier to lump together as outsiders and as a separate race. Given the very public display of Gan Gay's abilities, freezing in place a large swath of Manhattan, it's easy to see how mutants will not have made the best first impression with humans. And we haven't even heard a casualty count yet. But I imagine some people had to die from car accidents or people in the midst of surgery or medical care at hospitals when suddenly the doctors and nurses all freeze. We get a hint of how the adversarial relationship between homo sapiens and homo superiors will manifest. The DODC was dead set on stealing Gan Gray's powers, even if it costs her life, as it already cost the life of her sister. You can bet they'll attempt the same on other mutants. The scariest part of all, Spider-Man probably inadvertently gave the DODC their greatest weapon against mutants. Dr. Banner warned it was a dangerous idea, but Peter didn't listen. He went ahead and built a universal inhibitor. You can bet the DoD will try to replicate that technology and use it to suppress or oppress mutant kind as their kind begins to appear and spread. I can see it now. Magneto finds out Spider-Man is the one responsible for building the inhibitors used against his people. So he decides the web-headed menace needs to be stopped. Spider-Man 5: End of Days featuring Magneto as the villain played by Adam Driver. Actually, I think that rumor has been debunked. Anyway, we are starting to get beyond explained territory and pretty far into speculation. Usually a sign it's time to stop. I am beyond excited for Doomsday, Secret Wars, X-Men, and of course, whatever is next for Spider-Man. Stay tuned for my updated Every Spider-Man recap video and updated MCU timeline likely in October once Brand New Day is on digital so I can grab all the clips and images. With that, thank you for watching and see you on the next One Take.