Peter Parker gave maximum effort ahead of the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. When the movie kicks off, the Wall-Crawler is New York City’s golden child, helping get crime rates to an all-time low. Spider-Man doesn’t just forget about his villains once he defeats them, though. No, he puts together a villain board in his apartment that has information on all the city’s evildoers, including where they set up shop and what they’re capable of.
The board is visible a few times throughout Brand New Day. However, with so much going on in the Marvel Studios production, it’s easy to miss things. Fortunately, X user WilliamD1123, who helped put the board together as a member of Brand New Day‘s crew, posted a great look at the prop online. It has numerous Easter eggs that tease notable Marvel Comics villains, but the most interesting breadcrumb is a small note that connects J. Jonah Jameson to Scorpion.
Right under Mac Gargan’s photo, Peter wrote, “Scorpion connected to Jameson?” Obviously, Peter hasn’t been able to put all the pieces together. But he suspects J.K. Simmons’ character, who revealed his identity to the world at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, is in league with a villain with an axe to grind.
At no point in Brand New Day does Gargan bring up Jameson. Even when Jean Grey is in his head, he doesn’t spill the beans about some master plan cooked up by him and the editor of the Daily Bugle. Maybe that means Peter is wrong. Maybe William and his co-workers just wanted to include a nod to Jameson since he wasn’t going to appear in the movie, and thought the note would be a fun way to do it.
That explanation isn’t nearly as fun as the one where Jameson actually did have a hand in Scorpion’s reemergence in the MCU. In the comics, Jameson hired Gargan as a private investigator, hoping to learn more about Peter’s relationship with Spider-Man. The plan didn’t yield results, so Jameson kicked things up a notch by subjecting Gargan to brutal experiments that turned him into the Scorpion.
Gargan’s upgrades in Brand New Day are significant enough that giving him a wealthy benefactor would make sense. Since Jameson’s plans to expose Spider-Man as a fraud clearly didn’t work out, he might’ve turned to Gargan for help and made him more than just a petty criminal.
The odds just aren’t in Jameson’s favor, though, because Scorpion ends up becoming a key part in Jean’s plan to attack the Department of Damage Control and goes down hard. Simmons’ character will have no choice but to go back to the drawing board if he still plans on taking Spider-Man off the board. At least his comic book counterpart left behind a roadmap that could mean a lot of sleepless nights for Tom Holland’s hero.
J. Jonah Jameson Might Have Another Trick Up His Sleeve in Spider-Man 5
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has blown all expectations out of the water by becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time. The powers that be at Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios are unlikely to sit around counting the money for long because it’s in everyone’s best interest to get Spider-Man 5 in production sooner rather than later.
While it remains to be seen what kind of story takes shape for the follow-up, the note on the Brand New Day villain board could be a hint of things to come. Scorpion wasn’t the only bad guy Jameson bankrolled in the comics. He also funded Spencer Smythe, the mad scientist behind the creation of the Spider-Slayer robots.
The Spider-Slayers were programmed to bring Spider-Man down by any means necessary. However, they rarely left a mark on the hero, and the building process for them was so dangerous that it left Spencer with radiation poisoning. Spencer’s son, Alistair Smythe, set his sights on Spider-Man after his father died, becoming a cyborg known as the Ultimate Spider-Slayer.
Alistair made a brief appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, played by B.J. Novak, where he was nothing more than a middle manager at Oscorp. The MCU could take him to new heights by having his story play out on the big screen. Of course, he would need Jameson to get the ball rolling by reaching out to his father and putting the Spider-Slayers in production.
If the Brand New Day villain board is taken at face value, then Jameson is in a giving mood these days. That means the Spider-Slayers are in the running for villains for Spider-Man 5. The only problem is that they have plenty of competition.
The board features plenty of other names, all with vendettas against the Wall-Crawler. And then there’s always the chance that Kevin Feige and Co. pull a villain out of left field, as they did with Jean in Brand New Day.
