Spider-man: Brand New Day Learned A Valuable Lesson From Captain America: Civil War

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This article contains spoilers for "Spider-Man: Brand New Day."

If you haven't heard already, "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" made hundreds of internet fan theories come true by revealing that Sadie Sink's character is Jean Grey of the X-Men. Well, an X-Man to be, technically. Sink's Jean is reimagined as a foster kid who drifted through homes after her mother abandoned her, and who wants revenge on the government agency Damage Control for kidnapping her sister Sara (Olivia Booth-Ford).

Jean's presence, of course, establishes where the X-Men will begin in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even though "Brand New Day" never employs the word "mutant," it's clear that enough have popped up that the government is starting to notice them. The reception Jean's powers get, and what she does with them in this movie, sets up pretty well that the people of the MCU will treat mutants with the expected hate and fear. Jean is also all alone at the movie's end, leaving her in need of the mentorship Charles Xavier can offer.

Minor "X-Men" comic villain Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman, whom you may recognize from "Severance") is reimagined as the director of Damage Control. Metzger tries to harness Jean's telepathic powers, after accidentally killing her sister through similar experiments. Jean breaking free and almost killing him sets Metzger up to return later with an anti-mutant agenda.

The way that "Brand New Day" makes "X-Men" set-up a vital part of the story, and gives Jean a complete character arc, echoes one of the most successful backdoor "MCU" pilots: T'Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) in "Captain America: Civil War." Audiences got such a strong feel of T'Challa's character in that movie that they actively wanted to spend more time with him in a "Black Panther" movie.

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T'Challa is so integral to the narrative of "Captain America: Civil War" that if you take him out, the movie unravels. Zemo's (Daniel Brühl) plan to break apart the Avengers is to frame Captain America's (Chris Evans) best bud Bucky (Sebastian Stan) for a terrorist bombing — a bombing that killed T'Challa's father and Wakanda's king, T'Chaka (John Kani). T'Challa spends the whole movie chasing after Bucky, applying severe pressure that turns a splintering relationship between Cap and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) into a, well, civil war.

"Civil War" is a story about people letting their emotions, especially the desire for revenge, control their actions. In a movie that climaxes with Cap and Iron Man beating the hell out of each other, Black Panther is used as the heroic foil. He learns the truth of Zemo's plan, sees how vengeance has consumed all around him, and concludes, "I'm done letting it consume me." 

Compare this with Spider-Man's own introduction in "Captain America: Civil War," which doesn't quite hang together. It reads as an excuse to get Spider-Man into the superhero vs. superhero fight at the airport. That set-up needed to be last minute because Marvel Studios couldn't use Spider-Man in their movies until the 2015 deal with Sony. In fact, "Civil War" screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely told /Film that they started writing the script unsure if they could really use Spider-Man, which meant Black Panther's role ballooned to the movie's benefit.

The worst Marvel movie cameos can usually be excised with little fuss, which is not the case with Black Panther in "Civil War" — or with Jean Grey in "Spider-Man: Brand New Day."

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" is playing in theaters.