Shadow King Was Almost the ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Villain, and Spidey Would Never Have Seen Him

Every Spider-Man movie lives or dies by its villain, and the villain of ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ took a surprisingly winding road to the screen. Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey ultimately became the central antagonist, but she was far from the first idea. Writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers went through several concepts before landing there.

Part of the challenge was simply who they were allowed to use. Character availability across Sony and Marvel projects repeatedly limited the options, and drafts had to be reworked as characters became unavailable. Earlier reports have already revealed abandoned ideas involving Kraven the Hunter and Chameleon.

Now another discarded concept has surfaced. Shadow King was considered as the villain for ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ before Jean Grey, with the telepathic villain searching for his physical body, which had been hidden somewhere in New York.

The idea grew out of the writers’ work on a body-hopping villain. They had first imagined Chameleon using telepathy to possess other people, but Chameleon was ruled out after appearing in ‘Kraven the Hunter’. That pushed them toward the X-Men villain Shadow King, a telepath associated with Amahl Farouk and Professor X.

The plot they built was unusual. McKenna told The Bulwark that the audience would not even see the character, because he was “trying to find his body.” That body had been taken from him and hidden in New York long ago by people who recognized how dangerous he was.

The concept came with a complication. McKenna explained that a telepath who might be a mutant is no longer a Sony-controlled villain, which puts the writers in Marvel’s sandbox. Marvel allowed the idea, but only loosely, asking the writers not to call him Shadow King or Farouk since the studio was still working out its plans for mutants.

The final trailer for ‘SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY’ has been released.

In theaters on July 31. pic.twitter.com/D6Mh3fCjZN

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) July 21, 2026

Even so, the team wrote a whole draft around the idea. In it, Spider-Man would chase a disembodied voice through New York, sensing the villain hopping from body to body with his Spider-Sense. That image alone sounds like a fun, paranoid twist on the usual web-slinger formula.

The problem was the lack of a face-to-face antagonist. The writers eventually decided it wasn’t exciting enough to have Spider-Man face off with a disembodied villain. Spider-Man stories thrive on the hero’s personal connection to his foe, and a voice in the crowd couldn’t deliver that.

Then came the breakthrough. In September 2024, McKenna said a producer told him: “We got Jean Grey.” Her arrival kept the body-jumping idea and an X-Men connection, but Jean could also show up in the flesh, which checked every box the writers wanted.

The finished film has Jean causing harm to Peter and many bystanders by inhabiting their bodies and forcing them to do her bidding, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Sommers and McKenna said it was important to make her feel like a real threat, though they don’t believe she went as far as causing any deaths. In hindsight, the Shadow King draft looks like an early sketch of the same idea, with the mystery kept and the face added.

That is what makes these what-ifs so fascinating. Instead of a scrapped villain, the Shadow King concept became a building block, feeding directly into the antagonist audiences eventually got. It also shows how much of blockbuster writing comes down to negotiation with a moving roster of characters.

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