Sadie Sink at the “O’Dessa” Premiere during the SXSW Conference & Festivals at the Paramount Theatre on March 8, 2025 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Hubert Vestil/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images)
SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images
At a certain point, following any press for the movie at all, it seemed pretty obvious who Sadie Sink would be playing in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, despite it being pitched as a secret. A famous red-haired actress with telepathic powers whose role was being kept secret ahead of a publicly announced introduction of the X-Men in the MCU. No, she wasn’t going to be Punisher sidekick Rachel Cole-Alves. Rather, as we now can confirm, Sink is Jean Grey. A spoiler, perhaps, but if you’re looking up Jean Grey online here, you should already know that.
So, what does Sadie Sink being introduced to the MCU tell us about the X-Men? Some we may have guessed; other aspects would be new information.
- Once and for all, we can confirm that we are heading toward a “First Class” situation, where this will involve the initial assembly of mutants, given Sink’s age in the role. She is 24, but she appears to be playing younger in the film. When Sophie Turner was introduced as Jean Grey in the “young X-Men” era, she was 19, so expect that range.
- Jean Grey won’t be a supporting character. It took a little while for Jean to become the central figure in the original X-Men movies, but we have already seen that Sink’s Grey has gone from body-hopping to creating a literal psychic bubble of body-freezing a mile wide, in addition to immediately developing telekinetic powers on the spot. No “training period” where she slowly grows in power. We just saw that happen. It’s possible that she is the main X-Men leading the films to start with, rather than Rogue or Wolverine or Professor X as we saw in the past.
- Marvel seems open to dramatically changing how the X-Men assembly is going to work. This entire Jean Grey storyline linking her with Spider-Man has absolutely no basis in the comics at all. And if her story has been changed this sharply, it stands to reason that it will happen with other characters as well. In the comics, Sara Grey was married with kids, and the two of them were “kidnapped by Attuma, who wanted to breed with surface mutants to create a superior hybrid underwater species that would help him conquer Earth.” So yes, this storyline was a bit different.
- We know that Sink is appearing in Secret Wars, and if that doesn’t confirm a number of X-Men will be there as well, I don’t know what does. This, again, would be a change from the original comic story, as Jean Grey does not have a major role in Secret Wars. But given her high-profile introduction in Brand New Day, it seems like this would be much more than a cameo.
There is probably more to extrapolate, but I believe that’s a lot at baseline. What else do you think it implies?
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.