Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey and Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, How Their MCU Bond Actually Formed
‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ has finally answered a question fans had been chewing on for months, namely how Jean Grey fits into Peter Parker’s corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sadie Sink was first attached to Tom Holland’s fourth standalone Spider-Man film back in March 2025, though her role was kept secret for well over a year. Now that the movie is in theaters, the connection between the two characters is out in the open, and it turns out their relationship is more layered than a simple cameo.
Sink plays Jean Grey as a villain of sorts opposite Holland’s Peter Parker, at least for most of the film’s runtime. That framing matters, because it shapes how the two characters actually meet and why their bond becomes central to the film’s final act.
How Jean Grey And Peter Parker Meet In Brand New Day
For a chunk of ‘Brand New Day,’ Jean is presented as the film’s antagonist. The teenage telepath possesses unsuspecting people and uses them to attack Department of Damage Control facilities, and her motives stay unclear at first, which leads Peter Parker to team up with police and DODC director Bill Metzger, played by Tramell Tillman, to try to stop her.
Jean is eventually revealed as a teenage mutant who, along with her older sister Sara, was born with telepathy and telekinesis after the two were abandoned by their mother at a young age. Her abilities expand once she learns that Sara died in the very facility where she was being held, which pushes her telepathic reach further and puts everyone nearby inside her range.
Peter eventually learns the truth about Jean’s tragic past and allows her into his mind, where she sees his memory of his late Aunt May, who was killed by the Green Goblin. He offers her sympathy for her loss and tells her she is not alone, and when he senses a rifle shot aimed at her, he takes the bullet to save her life. Moved by that act, Jean releases everyone from her psychic hold and heals Peter’s gunshot wound before eventually leaving New York.
The film draws a direct parallel between the two of them, since both are isolated figures watching their powers evolve, and Peter talks Jean out of killing Metzger while encouraging her to find people who will accept her rather than shame her for being different.
Jean Grey’s Telepathy And The Peter Parker Memory Theory
One of the more debated threads coming out of the film involves whether Jean’s powers reach beyond her own scenes and into the memory wipe that erased Peter Parker from the world at the end of ‘No Way Home.’ The official stance from most ending explainers is that Michelle Jones-Watson has forgotten Peter Parker entirely, exactly as she states in the film.
That has not stopped a competing theory from gaining traction. While trapped inside Jean’s psychic hold, MJ is shown crying and later seen wearing the broken Black Dahlia necklace that Peter had given her, and it is assumed, though never stated outright, that Ned remembers Peter through their signature handshake at the end of the film.
Visual clues from Jean’s psychic bubble sequence support the idea that her abilities played some role in the pair regaining fragments of their memories of Peter. Jean’s history in the Fox ‘X-Men’ films offers a blueprint for this, since in ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ she touches Wolverine’s head and tells Cyclops she gave him back a piece of his past, restoring fragments of memories that had been erased.
Do you think Jean Grey will eventually restore everyone's memory of Peter?
The theory extends further with Bruce Banner, since when Jean enters his mind, what surfaces is not the calmer version of the Hulk the MCU has shown since ‘Endgame,’ but the Savage Hulk that Banner had spent years trying to suppress, and that version still recognizes who Peter Parker is.
The Case For Jean Restoring MJ And Ned’s Memories
Before the film’s release, industry chatter had already floated the idea that Jean’s presence in the story was tied directly to Peter’s erased identity. Scooper Daniel Richtman speculated that the only reason Jean appears in the movie is that she can bring back the memories MJ, Happy, and Ned once had of Peter. As a telepath and telekinetic, she would have direct experience with how minds and memories function, which lines up with using her powers to help Peter’s friends reconnect with him.
Fan theorizing has run further with this idea since the film hit theaters. One widely shared social post argues that Jean’s power at full force does not leave Doctor Strange’s memory spell fully intact, and that while she was not trying to break it, her use of telepathy in the film’s climax disturbed something never meant to be touched. That same theory points to Ned’s muscle memory responding to Peter before his conscious mind catches up, and to MJ still carrying his necklace without understanding why it means something to her.
There is also a practical angle to Jean’s inclusion, since rumors suggested Bruce Banner would turn into the Savage Hulk during the film, and Jean’s psychic abilities could help calm him by the story’s end.
Sadie Sink’s Casting And What It Means For Jean Grey’s Future
The persistent rumor throughout production was that Sink would play Jean Grey, a character previously brought to the big screen by Famke Janssen in the original ‘X-Men’ trilogy and later by Sophie Turner in ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ and ‘Dark Phoenix.’ With Sink’s casting now confirmed, it appears Marvel is prepping a younger generation of X-Men to eventually join the wider MCU.
Marvel Studios has confirmed that a new ‘X-Men’ movie is currently in development, though it will arrive after ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ in 2027, with ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ featuring legacy mutant actors from the Fox era in the meantime. For now, Jean stands as the only known future X-Man in Peter’s particular MCU timeline, and by the movie’s end she boards a bus out of New York, presumably heading toward Professor Charles Xavier’s school, though the film leaves that meeting for a future installment.
The film also plants hints of the destructive emotions in Jean that could eventually shape her into the Dark Phoenix, a transformation comic readers already associate with her as one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel history. Reaction to Sink’s performance has been enthusiastic across social media, with fans praising both her acting choices and the way the film built out Jean’s backstory before revealing her full power set.
Between the memory theories still circulating online and the road Jean’s story is clearly being set up to travel, there is plenty left to unpack about what her bond with Peter Parker means for the mutants still waiting to arrive in the MCU, so what do you make of how their story played out in ‘Brand New Day’?
