That Brand New Day Easter Egg You Missed Teases A Huge Spider-Man Controversy

Spider-Man: No Way Home definitely featured its fair share of villains — but if you thought that the MCU would be slowing down for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, you’ve got another thing coming. In terms of villains, Brand New Day’s brand new(!) trailer featured the return of Scorpion and a mysterious figure many are speculating to be Jean Grey. 

Additionally, based on the trailer, some are theorising that Venom or Morlun could potentially feature as an antagonist for Tom Holland’s fourth solo movie as the webslinger. However, thanks to a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, viewers think another bad guy might be showing up in the highly-anticipated flick…

The Shocking Villain Hiding in the Brand New Day Trailer

This hint is actually hidden in plain sight. During the Brand New Day trailer, where Peter attends a party, a beer keg can be seen in the background, reading: “Green Jackal.” 

For the average viewer, this might seem like a trivial detail, but for comic book readers, this is a significant discovery because one of Spider-Man’s most formidable foes is Jackal, who, as you may well have guessed, is green. 

Who Is The Jackal?: Spider-Man’s Infamous Villain, Explained

Before The Jackal, Miles Warren was just a regular Biology professor at Empire State University. It was here that he met Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, and found himself becoming infatuated with the latter. 

The day after Stacy’s death, inspired by his lab partner Anthony Serba cloning a frog, Warren started to focus on cloning humans. He gave Serba tissue samples of Parker and Stacy, telling him they were rat cells. After discovering that he had made human clones, Serba attempted to confront Warren — but the mad scientist ended up accidentally suffocating him to death by covering his mouth to stop him from talking.

Unable to cope with what he’d done, Warren’s personality split into two. Subsequently, he formed The Jackal persona and went into full villain mode, continuing to make clones all the while. Because he blamed Spider-Man for Stacy’s death, he causes trouble for the hero in a variety of ways, like aligning with his enemies and trying to orchestrate a gang war, among other things. At some point, he also uncovers Peter’s identity as Spider-Man. This all comes to a head when he lures Peter to fight one of his clones by strapping a bomb to Ned Leeds’ chest that only the real Spider-Man can disarm.

After being confronted by a Gwen Stacy clone, Jackal seems to have a change of heart, trying to free Leeds. But the bomb seems to end up killing him and the Spider-Man clone. Yet, the story didn’t end there.

Why Spider-Man’s Clone Saga Was HATED by Marvel Fans

Years later, it is revealed that the Peter clone survived the explosion, with the latter living under the alias Ben Reilly. The Jackal, who died in the explosion, was also revealed to be a clone. Then, in another twist, it is supposedly revealed that Reilly was the real Peter Parker. This had huge implications, as it meant that the Spider-Man comic book readers had been following since the explosion wasn’t actually Spider-Man.

Given this effectively undid years of Spidey’s character development, this was a very divisive choice. To make matters worse, as several Redditors pointed out, the saga just kept dragging on, with one noting that the storyline really “overstayed its welcome.” IGN reported that the main reason for this was that Marvel was facing bankruptcy, and the storyline was too lucrative to give up. So, the company padded the story out and made it incredibly convoluted in the process. 

This only really accelerated the hate train for the Clone Saga, so, eventually, Marvel cut its losses and retconned the whole thing. To do this, the writers brought Norman Osborn (Green Goblin) back from the dead and established that he orchestrated the whole clone mix-up to break Peter down. Which, to be fair, he did. It just so happens that, in the process, Marvel seemed to break the fandom down, too. But all’s well that ends well, right?

Is Spider-Man’s Most Controversial Story Coming to the MCU?

While The Jackal beer keg is likely just an Easter egg, it wouldn’t be completely absurd for the Peter we see in the Brand New Day trailer to be a clone.

The comics established that a lot of the imperfect clones The Jackal made ended up degenerating. And based on the way Peter is basically crumbling both physically and mentally in that trailer, it isn’t a complete stretch to say that he’s degenerating, too. Which, in turn, would pave the way for a clone revelation.

However, given that there’s no Gwen Stacy that we know of in the MCU just yet, The Jackal would be missing a motive. His inclusion, in turn, wouldn’t make a lot of sense unless Marvel drastically changed the story. But given how unpopular the Clone Saga was with comic fans, it seems unlikely that Marvel would risk reigniting this particular fire even slightly, given the risk of potentially alienating the fandom all over again.