Did Spider-Man: Brand New Day Just Introduce Cerebro?
Could we have already seen the predecessor to one of Charles Xavier's greatest inventions?
It might not have been expected when the character first made his MCU debut, but 10 years after Captain America: Civil War, the Spider-Man franchise has become one of the load-bearing series in the MCU. Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first film post-Endgame and gave us an in-depth look at the effects of the Blip, and No Way Home’s resurrection of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield was the first step into the current Multiverse Saga. As far as the interconnected promise of a Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Spidey franchise thus far has taken full advantage of the character’s presence in the larger mythos.
Warning! Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day ahead.
After months of speculation, the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day brings with it the reveal that yes, Sadie Sink is playing Jean Grey in the MCU. Introduced without mention of the X-Men or other mutants as a whole, Jean serves as the villain of the film, seeking vengeance on the Department of Damage Control for kidnapping her sister Sara Grey. While the introduction of such a crucial member of the X-Men is sure to dominate the conversation surrounding the movie, there are a handful of less emphasized but no less important narrative threads introduced in Brand New Day — including the introduction of a technology that may or may not become hugely important to the X-Men.
After months of beating around the bush, Sadie Sink turned out to be playing...exactly who everyone thought she would be.
Brand New Day establishes that not only is the U.S. Department of Damage Control — under the guidance of director Bill Metzger — aware to a degree of the existence of mutants, but is also hunting them down to study them, as evidenced by their kidnapping and torture of Jean’s sister. Clearly the organization has come a long way from their days as a S.H.I.E.L.D. subsidiary dedicated to post-battle cleanup, because after Spider-Man helps the agency capture Jean (with the help of a genetic inhibitor chip that has foreboding implications for the future), we discover that Metzger and his researchers tragically murdered Sara while trying to replicate her telekinetic powers, an experiment they plan on recreating using Jean.
Throughout the film, Jean’s telekinesis manifests mostly in the ability to jump into other people’s bodies, which is precisely what Damage Control is trying to test — using a piece of technology that strongly feels like a sort of predecessor to the X-Men’s Cerebro.
What is Cerebro?
The grandiose spherical room and platform interface in the Fox films is probably the most iconic depiction of Cerebro, despite its first appearance looking radically different.
Created in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original 1960s X-Men introductory run (issue #7 to be exact), Cerebro is a powerful telekinesis-amplifying supercomputer that allows the user, traditionally Professor Charles Xavier, to discover and interact with mutants over great distances. Because Jean Grey was Xavier’s first student, she helped him fine tune the machine and in the process became one of only a handful of frequent users — a list that includes Emma Frost and her clones, the Stepford Cuckoos. Not only has it been a tool of great aid for mutantkind in the hands of allies like Jean and Xavier, but it has also been weaponized by characters like Mister Sinister, Magneto, and even Doctor Doom.
In the film, Damage Control’s unnamed machine simply induces and measures the distance of Jean’s body-jumping ability, but that in and of itself could be the impetus for what becomes Cerebro. Jean’s telekinesis is visually represented as her entering crucial memories within the minds of her victims, which is ironically similar to the way the Fox X-Men movies presented the Cerebro interface. What if Xavier’s machine inevitably works by amplifying Jean’s powers to extreme distances (much like the finale of the film), thereby allowing her to monitor mutants around the United States and interact with them?
Jean’s introduction in Brand New Day is like a floodgate being opened, because Kevin Feige has already said the next chapter of the MCU post-Secret Wars will be heavily mutant focused. It’s safe to assume that there’s more in the film than just the presence of an X-Man that will become relevant once the team makes their full-scale debut in the future; a technological predecessor to Cerebro is precisely the kind of thing the MCU likes to hide in innocuous ways. Now that the franchise has taken its first steps into re-introducing their own version of Xavier’s first class, we can certainly expect to see a lot more touchstones of X-Men canon showing up in unexpected places.
