By the end of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter Parker has been reunited with his two closest friends – MJ and Ned – after their memories of their time together had to be wiped from their brains at the conclusion of the previous Spider-Man film No Way Home. Ned’s stolen memories are restored, but although she now knows of the mind wipe, MJ decides to build a new relationship with Peter rather than start up where they left off simply based on Peter’s word. Additionally, the Department of Damage Control has been left in somewhat of a battered state, mutant Jean Grey has left New York City on a bus that may be headed to somewhere in upstate New York and Bruce Banner has been locked up due to the damage caused by his alter ego, the Hulk, while under control of Jean’s telepathy.
These are lots of dangling plotlines to be explored in upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe films. But a look at the studio’s release slate shows us that they will have to wait as the next two films coming from Marvel are the two wrapping up their current “Multiverse Saga” – The Avengers: Doomsday and The Avengers: Secret Wars. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing Brand New Day that points towards either one of these two Avengers films, as a short post-credit scene let’s us know that “Spider-Man will return,” while hinting at the nature of that return.
The Spidey-Tracker
The end credit scene opens on the user interface for the Spidey-tracker phone app created by Ned that we saw both him and Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, use in the movie. The screen shows that a marker for a new Spider-Man sighting in the New York City borough of Queens, with a marker denoting the location. But the display at the top reads “Location: Unknown.” Then the display quickly zooms out to reveal the entire globe, before it begins zooming away from Earth all together and pans across deep space until it stops on what appears to be a section of empty space. The wording on the app changes to “Location Found.”
So apparently Spider-Man is somewhere in outer space.
While the film doesn’t explicitly state it, it feels suggested that Ned’s Spidey-Tracker app uses police scanner and crowd sourced information in order to give alerts as to where the wall crawler happens to be at any time. In that way, may work similar to a GPS app that crowd sources traffic conditions like Waze. Ned even mentions there being a chat room when he shows the app to Peter-as-Spidey.
Since that kind of information gathering wouldn’t ever yield the results that we see here, one could assume that Peter may have created his own homing device to let Ned know through the app where he is. Given Ned’s previous role in Spider-Man’s adventures as his “man in the chair,” it certainly makes sense that the two would work something like this out.
Of course, the whole end credit scene could be read as just symbolic of where we will next see Peter, rather than a literal piece of storytelling. Either way it it points to where we will see Peter Parker next.
Location Unknown
So where could this unknown location actually be? Well, for those readers familiar with the Marvel Comics event “Secret Wars” that next year’s Avengers movie will be drawing inspiration from, the answer feels simple – Battleworld.
For those who have not read the 2015 Secret Wars series, Battleworld is a planet created by Dr. Doom featuring chunks from a number of different alternate Earths he managed to save in the midst of a giant multiversal collapse. Most of the heroes have lost their memories and it is up to the few remaining heroes who did retain their memories to remind their colleagues of how the world used to be and figure out to return things back to the way they were.
So why don’t we think that we’ll see Peter this December in The Avengers: Doomsday first? Well, beyond the fact that Tom Holland has not been announced as a cast member for the film, he just wasn’t available as production of Brand New Day overlapped with Doomsday. Still, both movies in part shot at Pinewood Studios, so there may have been a window where Holland could have walked from one of the Brand New Day soundstages to a Doomsday soundstage for a quick cameo. We’ll find out on December 18 when The Avengers: Doomsday hit theaters and December 17, 2027 when The Avengers: Secret Wars premiers.
