With its newfound status as the highest-ever grossing film in the US, it’s clear audiences are loving Spider-Man: Brand New Day. For all its virtues, though, Marvel’s latest also isn’t quite perfect. The film still succumbs to the franchise’s more grating instincts, once again sidelining Peter Parker (Tom Holland) to focus on the origins of a completely different character. Brand New Day also feels strangely disconnected from the corners of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe that Spider-Man should be intimately familiar with.
After Daredevil: Born Again and Disney+’s Punisher special — neither of which felt in step with the MCU — many hoped that Brand New Day would somehow bridge the gap between the larger universe and the remnants of Netflix’s Defenders-verse. Unfortunately, the film is more content to swing in the limbo between those two worlds: its attempts to fold more Defenders characters into the MCU, like Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple, were unfortunately cut for time. Of course, there’s no telling if a mere cameo would have fixed that disjointed feeling between Daredevil, Punisher, and Spider-Man — but with Brand New Day heading back into theaters for a victory lap, we may get the answer very soon.
Per Deadline, Marvel and Sony are planning to extend Brand New Day’s theatrical window in an unexpected way. The film is still doing gangbusters on the big screen, but a new version of it is apparently waiting in the wings. The Brand New Day rerelease will contain new footage not yet seen, including the deleted scene that would have brought Claire Temple into the MCU.
Dawson first broke the news about her Brand New Day cameo at this year’s GalaxyCon. “I even shot a scene in the new Spider-Man movie,” she revealed, “But I got cut out.”
Her cameo would have seen her reprising her duties as the “Night Nurse,” this time for Spider-Man. Claire appeared in every Defenders series, from Daredevil to Luke Cage, as the go-to physician for New York’s most active vigilantes. She became a fixture of New York’s street-level scene, at least within the Netflix universe, so it’d make all the sense in the world to see Spider-Man also turn to her for help — if only to further fold the Defenders universe into the MCU.
15 years ago, this deleted scene would have lived solely on the special features of a DVD, technically part of MCU canon but likely regarded as a bit of niche fandom knowledge. That Marvel has reportedly seen fit to canonize it on the big screen is a pretty big deal: this could set a new precedent for superhero movies, but it will also bring the MCU and the Defenders-verse one step closer to true synergy.
