Sometimes the worst creative setbacks produce the best creative outcomes. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now widely regarded as one of the strongest entries in the MCU’s Spidey run — and it turns out it has Sony’s catastrophic Kraven the Hunter partly to thank for that.
Screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have revealed that their original villain for Brand New Day was not Jean Grey, played with unsettling precision by Sadie Sink, but a very different Marvel character entirely: Dmitri Smerdyakov, the Chameleon. And the reason he was cut had nothing to do with the creative merits of the idea.
Chameleon Was Always the First Choice
Speaking on The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast, McKenna explained how the writing duo landed on the Chameleon as their initial pick for Brand New Day’s central antagonist. The classic Spider-Man villain — a master of disguise who has been causing problems for Peter Parker since Amazing Spider-Man #1 — felt like a natural fit for a film built around identity and deception.
The challenge was execution. In a post-Skrull MCU, simply having a villain wear a mask or take on another face felt redundant. McKenna and Sommers needed a fresh angle on what made Dmitri Smerdyakov dangerous. Their solution was elegant: give Chameleon mind-control powers, allowing him to blend into people’s perceptions rather than just their eyeline.
“We were going, ‘Well, Chameleon, but how do you do that? Well, they’ve done Skrulls. You’re not going to do masks. How do we do that?’ And then we hit upon the idea of mind control.” — Chris McKenna
It was a genuinely compelling concept — a villain who doesn’t just look like someone else, but makes you believe he is. For a franchise that had spent three films wrestling with Peter Parker’s public identity, the fit was obvious.
The Mind-Control Pivot That Changed Everything
The mind-control idea itself survived the loss of Chameleon entirely. That’s the quiet genius at the heart of this particular development story: the writers didn’t abandon the creative logic, they detached it from the character and searched for who it fit better.
What they landed on was Jean Grey — and the fit, as any X-Men reader could tell you, was immediately superior. Jean Grey’s telepathic and telekinetic abilities made mind control feel earned rather than retrofitted. Her history with Phoenix and unbridled power gave the writers room to build genuine threat. And for the MCU, introducing her as a villain — manipulative, volatile, deeply powerful — before a proper X-Men film was a move with long-term implications.
How Kraven’s Flop Closed a Door — and Opened a Better One
The Chameleon idea was killed not by a creative decision but by a corporate one. Fred Hechinger had already played Dmitri Smerdyakov — Kraven’s half-brother, set up as the future Chameleon — in Sony’s 2024 Spider-Man spinoff Kraven the Hunter. That film earned $62 million against a budget of over $110 million, and in doing so effectively dismantled the entire Sony Spider-Man Universe before it could get properly started.
The Chameleon reveal in Kraven’s post-credits scene, designed to tee up future appearances, became instead one of 2024’s most mocked movie moments — a viral meme for all the wrong reasons. There was no path to rehabilitating the character in any serious MCU context without dragging in all of that baggage.
Box office context: Kraven the Hunter made $62 million on a $110 million+ budget, ending Sony’s extended Spider-Man spinoff universe entirely.
“You can’t do Chameleon,” McKenna said, summing up the situation with characteristic bluntness. “But that got us on the path of mind control, and then mind control eventually led to us getting who was the perfect character for that role, who was Jean Grey. That was a journey.”
Why Jean Grey Was the Right Villain All Along
Sadie Sink’s performance as Jean Grey in Brand New Day has been one of the film’s most discussed elements — a character who operates as the primary antagonist for much of the runtime before Tramell Tillman’s William Metzger is revealed as the true architect behind events. It’s a structure that plays with audience expectations in ways Chameleon, even a reimagined version, might not have managed as effectively.
More significantly, it plants Jean Grey firmly in the MCU canon in a way that carries weight beyond this single film. Her power level, her psychology, and her fractured relationship with control are all established here in ways that will clearly inform whatever X-Men project comes next.
McKenna and Sommers didn’t get the villain they originally wanted. What they got instead was considerably more interesting — and Kraven the Hunter’s spectacular collapse is, in a roundabout way, why Brand New Day has one of the more compelling antagonists in the MCU’s recent run.
