Spider-Man: Brand New Day writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers are currently hard at work on Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, but the writing duo recently made time to chat with The Wrap about the wall-crawler's MCU return.
Rumours have swirled about Rosario Dawson's cut cameo, with it widely reported that she interacted with Spider-Man and The Punisher relatively late in the movie when Peter Parker is in hospital. Not so, according to McKenna and Sommers.
Instead, Spidey would have sought help from the Night Nurse after his brutal clash with the Jean Grey-controlled Scorpion.
"Rosario Dawson is great. I wasn’t there for those discussions. But it was great," McKenna said of the deleted scene. "If anything, you have a movie that is two-and-a-half hours long, and it’s almost an embarrassment of riches with so many great characters and so many great scenes."
Sommers added, "The scene they did was a good scene. I think the only reason it’s not in the final cut was just that it was probably cut for time because it was very good." Asked why they think it was cut, they pointed out that Spidey's meeting with Claire was "kind of a double beat" because it came right before Peter's first meeting with Bruce Banner.
One cameo that was always going to be in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova. Contrary to speculation, she wasn't inserted into the movie to boost interest in the character ahead of December's Avengers: Doomsday. Instead, the writers knew they wanted Black Widow from the start.
"We were talking about Yelena and then the idea that she’s in the banya and that he has to get in," Sommers recalled. "He won’t take his mask off. It was one of those things that made us all laugh, and then the next thing you know, it’s happening."
"It existed in every draft. We have to have the sequence. We just knew," McKenna noted. "We felt like it’s always better to have him on his heels. Tom playing Spider-Man on his heels is just the dream. And her putting him on his heels just felt like, 'Oh, we gotta have this in the movie, even though we knew we could only have her probably for a little bit because of the Avengers timeline and everything."
Quizzed about the sexual undertones in the scene where a nude Yelena and Peter, in just his mask and underwear, bathe together, Sommers confirmed that it was all part of showing that he's Spider-Man now. "That came up. It’s like, Can we? Should we? And then it was the same thing – it’s like, Well, he’s a big boy now."
When it came to Spider-Man: Brand New Day's vague post-credits scene (showing the Spider-Tracker seemingly finding a Spider-Man on another Earth), McKenna called it "fun" and teased, "It's a little tease of something to come. Or maybe not. I don’t know," adding that "it’s purposely vague."
Explaining that they've written many stingers that didn't ultimately make the cut, Sommers revealed that he wrote "something involving Spider-Man the TVA" before they were introduced in Loki and featured in Deadpool & Wolverine, likely for 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theaters.