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Warning: Spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Brand New Day

The Dark Phoenix will rise again. Probably. Eventually. 

A new version of Jean Grey made her debut in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink follows in the footsteps of Famke Janssen and Sophie Turner as the redheaded telepath who is arguably the most powerful mutant in the Marvel comics. But the Jean that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) meets is just a lonely teenager who can’t fully control her powers. She presumably won’t learn how until she meets Professor Charles Xavier and the other mutants at his school. Those X-Men are coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a new cast in the iconic roles. It’s just going to take a few more years.

Disney acquired 21st Century Fox way back in 2019, and Marvel fans have been waiting ever since for Magneto, Storm, and Cyclops fighting alongside the Avengers. There have been hints of what is to come: Ms. Marvel carries the X-gene, the fabled marker of a mutant. And the Deadpool & Wolverine movie was the first X-Men movie set inside the MCU. But Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has long promised something more deliberate, a dedicated series of X-Men movies and a “reset” of the stories that came before.

Jean appears to be the first character in that reset, which is confusing because the old versions of various X-Men characters are still here. Ian McKellen's Magneto, Patrick Stewart's Professor X, and James Marsden's Cyclops all turn up in Avengers: Doomsday later this year. Whether they survive it is another question, and the odds don't look good. Here's what Jean's introduction tells us about how Marvel plans to get from one set of X-Men to the other.

How is Jean Grey introduced in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

Jean is the misunderstood villain of the latest Spider-Man movie. She uses mind control to break into the Department of Damage Control, the government body originally created to clear the rubble after the fight in the first Avengers movie and since expanded into something closer to SHIELD, charged with safeguarding the public. Its head, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), has a private agenda: he wants to contain superpowered beings and take their abilities. He kidnaps Jean's sister Sarah, also a telepath, and performs experiments on her. Jean tries to save her, but arrives too late.

The movie draws a parallel between Jean Grey and Peter Parker. Both are isolated. Both see their powers evolve. (We even get hints of the destructive emotions in Jean that could eventually manifest in her alter-ego Dark Phoenix.) Peter talks Jean out of killing Metzger and encourages her to find friends who can embrace her for who she is rather than shame her for being different. At the end of the movie, she boards a bus out of New York. Somewhere ahead of her is the found family at Professor X’s school.

For now, Jean is the only future X-Man we know of in Peter's timeline. That distinction matters, because the MCU has spent years establishing that variants of the same hero exist across parallel timelines. Bruce Banner and the Ancient One lay out the branching rules in Avengers: Endgame. Loki built an entire series around the TVA, the bureaucracy tasked with policing different timeline branches. And in Deadpool & Wolverine, Deadpool shops across timelines for a Wolverine variant willing to help him save his universe. The Jean Grey played by Janssen, along with Cyclops (Marsden), Magneto (McKellen), and Storm (Halle Berry), live in one of those other timelines.

How do the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day set up an X-Men film?

In Brand New Day, Peter’s actions may set in motion a major conflict between mutants and the government. Peter begins to develop new abilities thanks to a spike in arachnid hormones. At first, he can’t control his new powers; they make him stronger but also more angry. In an effort to return to “normal,” Peter visits Bruce Banner, a.k.a. The Hulk, who has invented a gamma radiation inhibitor to prevent himself from turning into “the big green guy.” Peter suggests that he could adapt the technology to target specific genes, preserving his “good” powers while suppressing the “bad” ones. Banner warns that judging which evolutionary traits are good or bad is an ethical slippery slope.

Nonetheless, Peter builds both an inhibitor calibrated to target his own evolved powers and a universal one, which he uses to defeat Jean Grey. By the end of the film, the Department of Damage Control has its hands on the universal inhibitor. It’s probably not the last we see of it.

A device that can suppress superhuman abilities will likely play a major role in future X-Men films. Mutants, and Magneto in particular, are frequently in conflict with the government over the attempt to eliminate or “normalize” them. While Professor X advocates for finding a way to live harmoniously beside humans, Magneto frequently takes the stance that humans will inevitably target mutants because of their differences. With the inhibitor, Peter may have accidentally seeded a future conflict between whoever this universe’s Magneto turns out to be and Bill Metzger, should Metzger attempt to use this technology to continue to capture, control, experiment on, and eliminate mutants as he does to Sarah.

Already some early fans are comparing Peter’s invention of this universal inhibitor to J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer: The physicist built the atomic bomb and then came to regret it, spending years advocating against nuclear proliferation. By the end of Brand New Day, Peter has accepted his own evolution and come to realize the government had specifically designed weapons to contain him. Once Peter understands how the universal inhibitor could be weaponized against people with special abilities, he surely will side with the mutants against its use.

How are the Fox X-Men in Avengers: Doomsday if they are from a different timeline?

Trailers and casting announcements have confirmed a substantial Fox contingent in Doomsday: Stewart as Professor X, McKellen as Magneto, Marsden as Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, Kelsey Grammer as Beast, and Channing Tatum as Gambit, who never appeared in the Fox movies but did make his debut in Deadpool & Wolverine.

It’s unclear which timelines these X-Men hail from. Stewart’s Professor X has already died three different times: vaporized by Jean Grey in X-Men: The Last Stand, stabbed through the chest by X-24 in Logan, and neck-snapped by Wanda Maximoff in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Whatever version shows up in Doomsday, it's presumably a variant we haven't met.

The Doomsday trailers suggest that Marvel is employing a specific mechanism that gets all the superheroes in the same room: an incursion, a catastrophic event where the two separate universes collide and destroy one another. In a recent trailer, Professor X seems to witness an incursion. Fans are speculating that various superheroes travel across timelines to join forces and stop both the incursions. In fact, the Fantastic Four have already made that journey: At the end of Thunderbolts*, Yelena (Florence Pugh) spots the Fantastic Four's ship entering her universe. If the Fantastic Four can reach the Avengers' timeline, the Avengers can presumably reach the X-Men timeline.

What role will the X-Men play in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars?

Feige said at a fan event that Secret Wars will launch “a new age of mutants” in the MCU. That tracks with the comics storyline from which the movie takes its name. In the comics, every parallel timeline is destroyed. A great many heroes and villains die. Many survivors forget their past lives and live on the single remaining planet, Battleworld, ruled by Doctor Doom. That story let Marvel writers clear the board, cut the characters who weren't working, keep the ones who were, and introduce new ones.

On screen, Secret Wars is a tidy way to justify a new cast and a rebooted storyline. How Jean Grey fits into this plan is unclear. She could survive the incursions and wind up on Battleworld, possibly alongside Peter Parker, who winds up in space in a Brand New Day post-credits. Or perhaps she will become an early recruit to the X-Men team after the events of Secret Wars.

When will there be a new X-Men movie?

A new X-Men movie is in the works, though fans won’t see it until after 2027’s Secret Wars. Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier is helming with a script by Lee Sung Jin (Beef) and Joanna Calo (The Bear).

At the San Diego Comic-Con in 2026, Feige told fans, "I can't wait for all of you to see Avengers: Doomsday. We have a movie after that called Avengers: Secret Wars, and then after that the mutants are coming, and the X-Men are coming. That's been a dream of mine." He has since said the cast will be young, as the characters are in the comics.

A lot is riding on the Marvel Studios’ execution of the X-Men saga. Fans have expressed frustration at how convoluted the Marvel multiverse has become and how newer additions to the MCU haven’t reached the emotional highs of Iron Man or Captain America. Refocusing on the X-Men could open up new stories and offer a more streamlined Marvel storytelling experience going forward.