While Sony and Marvel’s recent “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” saw a changing of the guard with Destin Daniel Cretton taking over directing duties from Jon Watts, the film retained the franchise’s writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers.
The pair remain the sole credited writers on the film, even as it was widely known that “Challengers” scribe Justin Kuritzkes did a bunch of major uncredited rewrites on set.
Recently, McKenna and Sommers have been talking about ideas that were floated for the film and were scrapped. In an interview with The Bulwark recently, McKenna revealed an early version of the film’s script had Tom Holland’s Peter Parker introducing himself to MJ (Zendaya) not as ‘Maynard’ but as a British man named Ben Reilly.
The result is essentially a “Victor/Victoria”-style situation (woman dressing up as a man dressing up as a woman) – just with accents rather than gender. It would’ve also would’ve allowed Holland to use his natural accent even as he might have had to deliberately butcher it a little:
“We had him putting on his British accent, so it would have been Tom’s British accent, but Tom from Queens pretending he’s British.”
While fans have expressed a wish to have seen his, some have taken umbrage at the use of the name Ben Reilly, which refers to the Marvel comic character also known as Scarlet Spider.
The same interview generated a lot of discussion on Sunday online when quotes from McKenna revealed multiple villains were considered (and rejected) for the movie including The Spot, Kraven, Chameleon, and the Shadow King.
McKenna also confirmed that the inspiration for their body-jumping scenes was the obvious one reviewers picked up on:
“Could you do it where someone is basically taking people, you know, possessing people? So we got excited by that. We’re like, ‘Oh, like [the Denzel Washington 1998 film] ‘Fallen.’.”
Very early on in the process, McKenna says they had a fun time spitballing ideas, including a whole different kind of film which would’ve had Peter now living in Southeast Asia taking down gangs as he is “so done with New York”.
He gets pulled back to it when video of a different ‘Spider-Man’ in New York emerges and must deal with the imposter, only to be served a cease-and-desist as the impostor had copyrighted the Spider-Man brand, trademarked it, and had his web fluid. He hires Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) as a lawyer to help him fight it.
This fits with producer Amy Pascal’s comments, which said the film went in “a hundred different directions” during development before landing where it did.
