“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” Writers Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers on Finding the Story’s Missing Piece

To say that screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers understand the Spider-Man audience amounts to a multi-billion-dollar understatement. They were the narrative architects behind the previous three films—Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home, all directed by Jon Watts—which were all critically and commercially successful. Now, McKenna and Sommers’ fourth Peter Parker collaboration (all featuring Tom Holland, of course), Spider-Man: Brand New Day, has become a historic juggernaut, breaking records with a film that’s deeper and more emotional than any previous film in their Spidey canon. 

Sommers says he and McKenna envisioned a more mature Peter Parker at the heart of Brand New Day, which finds Holland’s Peter Parker more alone than ever. Returning franchise stalwarts Zendaya, who plays Peter’s former girlfriend, MJ (more on that ‘former’ in a second), and Jacob Batalon, returning as Peter’s bestie, Ned, no longer know who Peter is thanks to the fallout from the events in No Way Home. Franchise newcomers include Stranger Things star Sadie Sink in a crucial role, Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle/the Punisher, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk, and Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova/Black Widow. “We knew this would be a story about Peter’s loneliness, and Peter growing up,” Sommers explains. “There were a few things we wanted to make sure we had. One was that Peter Parker was not going to have a mentor. He wasn’t gonna go running to an older person for advice the way he has in the past.”

McKenna and Sommers, who previously deconstructed Far From Home for the Credits, are now in London working on Marvel Studios’ upcoming Avengers movies. From England, they discuss their collaboration with new director Destin Daniel Cretton, the beauty of a well-placed callback and the explosive power of Spider-Man’s telepathic adversary.

Spoiler alert!  The following Q&A contains many of the film’s marquee reveals, so proceed with caution.  

Brand New Day marks your first collaboration with director Destin Daniel Cretton. His breakthrough indie film Short Term 12 demonstrated a keen understanding of alienated young people. Did that interest in character-driven storylines make him a good fit for this chapter of the Spider-Man story?

Sommers: Certainly, Destin has an interest in the trauma and emotional trials of younger people, and he brought that interest to this movie. Our villain, too, is a young person with trauma and feelings of loneliness. Working with Destin, it was immediately obvious, “This is the guy.”

Did Destin have input on the overall story or did you deliver him a completed document and he took it from there?

McKenna: No, it was definitely collaborative. We developed a script with the producers, with [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal, with Sony, so we already had a lot of the story in place, but we didn’t get Jean Grey as our villain until after Destin came on.

That’s a huge development!

McKenna: She was the missing piece that we needed desperately. Bringing on Jean Grey and delving into her backstory was perfect for Destin and for us. As we all know, telling a Spider-Man story is so dependent on the so-called villain—the antagonist—and Jean Grey’s journey would also serve as a mirror and foil of sorts for our hero Peter Parker. 

One of the interesting things about Brand New Day is that the “bad guys” aren’t necessarily all that bad, and the good guys are far from perfect—The Punisher, for example, nearly kills Peter Parker, accidentally, and the Damage Control director Metzger [Tramell Tillman] tortures innocent civilians. Above all, there’s Jean Grey. How did you approach the creation of these complicated characters?

Sommers: Peter’s older, he’s growing up, and he’s alone. That led us to lean into the nuances of being out there by yourself in the world where it’s harder to tell who’s good and who’s bad. Sometimes you’re viewing things through a lens that’s too simplistic because it’s the lens of your teenage years, and now a lot of the veil is coming down as you realize just how complicated things are out there in the world.

McKenna: And also, Peter doesn’t fit the standard archetype of someone who punches his way through every problem and beats down his enemies. He has a history of trying to find the good in them, sometimes to his own detriment.

Your Brand New Day plot twists can sometimes make the audience wonder what the heck is going on, especially when characters suddenly seem to be not themselves for a few moments. They do something evil and then snap out of it. How did you decide to delay the truth behind these weird transformations?

McKenna: We wanted to plunge Peter into a mystery, and our antagonist lends herself to mystery because she could be anyone and no one. She’s masked, in her own way. Even in early drafts, people loved the mystery element of not giving away who our villain was. To us, that felt like an original way to tell a Spider-Man story.  

And then there’s the telepathic message Jean Grey gets from her sister Sara that simply says “VMAX,” which turns out to be an air ventilator label in the Damage Control interrogation room. 

McKenna: We knew it would be more heartbreaking for Jean to find out that she’d been chasing someone who had actually already died while sitting in the spot where her sister had been tortured by Damage Control [by seeing the torn label of a ceiling ventilator]. That leads to Jean Grey’s emotional outburst reaction, which then leveled up her powers. Holding off that revelation about her sister’s death until that moment was crucial to the action escalation we needed for a dramatic Act Three. By making it a rescue mission that is revealed to be not a rescue mission at all, that was the most powerful direction.

Sommers: And Peter Parker’s not only plunged into a mystery, but he’s also going through this personal problem because the tools that worked for him before and made him the only person on the planet who could detect this villain—suddenly those tools are taken away. That led him to build an inhibitor to suppress the changes he was going through.

One thing leads to another.  

McKenna: You know, story is structure. I read that in William Goldman’s book “Adventures in the Screen Trade” when I was first getting into writing, and I had no idea what he was talking about. But now I realize structure really is storytelling. With Brand New Day, we knew it probably wouldn’t be until at least the midpoint or beyond that we would reveal who was behind this voice jumping around in people’s heads.

Florence Pugh’s Black Widow, Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher, and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk play exciting roles in this story, but Peter Parker’s former girlfriend, MJ, and best friend Ned drive the emotional core of the story because their memories of Spider-Man were wiped at the end of the previous movie. What were you aiming for with these poignant scenes where Peter Parker sees these people he loves but they don’t even recognize him? 

Sommers: It tied into the overall theme of growing up, right? We’ve all gone through a period where we moved out. For some, it’s college, for some, it’s going off to work somewhere, going to the military, whatever it is, you have to leave the nest and enter the world. So this memory wipe was like an extension of that kind of isolation. We thought very carefully about those relationships because we know people desperately want Peter Parker to be back with his loved ones.

And it seems you designed the plot to address that yearning?

Sommers: Well, you want to see those reunions, but how soon do you want to see them? Peter Parker and MJ are on the rooftop where she says she remembers him—and this is obviously a spoiler—but it’s not real. Let’s say MJ really did remember Spider-Man at that point, and they go right back to where they were in the previous movie? I don’t think people would have been satisfied. I know we wouldn’t have been.

McKenna: That rooftop scene was really fun because it allowed us to go to the audience, “Oh, this is what you want, this is what Peter wants,” and then pull the rug out. Later on, when he actually has the honest scene with the real MJ, it goes about as well as you would expect. She tells him what we all don’t want her to say and what we’ve all probably been told at a certain point in our lives: “I don’t feel that way about you.” To torture Peter Parker like that is cruel, but it was also necessary because he needed to let go of the past and turn the page on that chapter of his life, as we all need to do.

You guys use callbacks very skillfully, especially at the end when you reference Ned Leeds and Peter Parker’s secret handshake last seen five years earlier in No Way Home.

McKenna: Chris and I have a dear friend named Brian Boyle, and he once said something that struck us as so true. “People like to remember things.”

Sommers: Callbacks are a great tool, but you have to be very careful about how you use them. Luckily, that handshake is in more than one movie, so maybe there’s a little muscle memory for the audience, and therefore, hopefully, it’s stuck in their brains. Finding the right place for it at the end of the movie gave us a little button, a little glimmer of hope, for their relationship. Being able to land it there felt very sweet.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now.

Featured image: Sadie Sink stars as Jean Grey in Columbia Pictures SPIDER-MAN™: BRAND NEW DAY. Photo by: Jay Maidment