Spoiler warning
This post covers all of Brand New Day, including the ending and the credits scene. If you haven’t seen it yet, turn back now.
What this post covers
- Why What If…? is the right frame for rewriting this movie
- The branch point: Peter’s mentor is Matt Murdock instead of Bruce Banner
- The ripple effect: what changes when the Punisher fills the Hulk’s slot
- Writing the second credits scene the movie never had
I saw Brand New Day in 4-sided ScreenX. The only format in the world that stretches the image up onto the ceiling is a treat, sure — but what I kept chewing on walking out of the theater was the editing. Show what needs showing, hide what needs hiding. That’s what a trailer is supposed to do, and it’s been a while since I saw one this disciplined.
Chewing on the film long enough, a frame better than “what if I had adapted it” came to mind. Marvel already has a dedicated format for exactly this kind of daydream — the Disney+ animated series What If…?, where the Watcher shows up as an observer and walks you through a multiverse that split at a single branch point. Change one branch point in Brand New Day and you get a What If episode.
So from here on, I’ll play Watcher for a bit.
What if Spider-Man’s mentor had been Daredevil?
Every choice creates a universe. The question you toss out walking through a theater door is no exception — what if, instead of the door to Banner’s lecture hall, Peter had knocked on a different one?
The branch point: Murdock’s office instead of Banner’s lecture hall
In the original timeline, Peter seeks out Bruce Banner — now an ESU professor — to learn how to suppress the Hulk through technology, and that conversation is what leads him to build a power-dampening device himself.
In this universe, Peter walks right past that lecture hall door. Instead, he knocks on the office door of the lawyer he crossed paths with in No Way Home.
CCharlie Cox(Matt Murdock / Daredevil). This time it isn’t legal counsel — it’s counseling. As someone who has lived his whole life with sensory overload, Matt tells Peter to skip the dampener and instead learn to accept the change and control it himself. Exactly the way Stick taught him.
That flips the entire character of the mentorship. Banner’s advice amounts to “this power is dangerous, so suppress it.” Murdock’s amounts to “this sense is yours, so train it.” The first is a hardware problem. The second is a discipline problem.
The dampener still gets built
Matt telling Peter not to use a dampener doesn’t contradict Peter later building the general-purpose dampener that subdues Jean Grey. One is a question of self-control, the other a question of neutralizing a threat. Even in the original timeline, Banner never handed Peter the device — Peter built it himself after the conversation. Only the mentor changed. The inventor is still Peter.
The ripple effect: the Punisher takes the Hulk’s slot
In the original timeline, the Hulk is a character who has been running on fumes since Endgame, never quite finding an identity — and here he gets mind-controlled by Jean Grey, rampages as Savage Hulk, and is hauled off to a psychiatric ward.
This branch has no Hulk to begin with. Which leaves an empty role in the sequence where Jean Grey confronts Damage Control director Metzger: someone has to hold Spider-Man’s attention.
The Punisher takes that slot. Frank’s firepower blows the vault door open, and Jean slips through the gap to face the director. But the moment that firepower swings toward Jean, Spider-Man steps in front of Frank.
That’s the core of this branch. Early in the original timeline, Frank pushes Peter to use violence against Jean Grey. Here, the climax mirrors it exactly — early on Frank pushes Peter toward violence; late on Peter pulls Frank away from it. The theme the Hulk carried, “power beyond control,” becomes the theme the Punisher carries: “violence as a choice.”
In the space the Hulk left behind, Spider-Man finds an unexpectedly sharper mirror — the moment the one who pushed and the one who pulls back trade places.
And every branch, in the end, leads to another branch.
The second credits scene — Xavier comes to her
One of the pleasures specific to What If is the way the end of one timeline seeds another. So this branch writes one more credits scene. Marvel films traditionally have two stingers; this one had only a single scene, so let’s fill the empty second slot.
The original timeline ends by implying Jean Grey boards a bus headed for Westchester. The problem: even if Jean knows Xavier exists, she has no particular reason to walk into that school on her own.
This branch reverses the direction. Xavier detects a rapidly emerging mutant through Cerebro and comes to Jean himself to offer her a place. That’s the recruitment formula X-Men comics have used for decades. Cashing the setup in explicitly, in a single credits shot, is also a far better way to lay track for the X-Men’s arrival in the new trilogy.
Summary
| Element | Original timeline | This branch |
|---|---|---|
| Mentor | Bruce Banner (ESU lecture hall) | Matt Murdock (law office) |
| Direction of mentorship | Suppress the power with tech | Accept the senses and train them |
| Counterweight at the climax | Hulk (rampages, then exits) | Punisher (firepower, then Peter stops him) |
| Emotional throughline | Power out of control | Early/late symmetry on violence |
| Credits scenes | 1 (Jean boards the bus) | 2 (Xavier comes to her) |
This universe concludes its observation here. The Watcher moves on to the next fork.
And that’s where I take the Watcher costume off. The What If…? writers’ room is not going to read this post — but if they do, the storyboards are on you.
Related reading
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