Spider-Man: Brand New Day Writer Reveals Scrapped British Accent Subplot

Spider-Man: Brand New Day co-writer Chris McKenna revealed on The Bulwark podcast that the MCU film explored alternative approaches before settling on its final narrative. One abandoned concept involved Tom Holland's Peter Parker adopting a British accent when reuniting with Zendaya's MJ.

"We went down some different roads," McKenna explained. "At one point, we had him putting on a British accent. So it would have been Tom's British accent, but Tom from Queens pretending he's British."

In this scrapped version, Parker would have used the alias Ben Reilly, a character from Marvel comics who is a Spider-Man variant and clone created by the villain the Jackal. McKenna described the concept as Parker "pretending to be someone else" while attempting to infiltrate a mystery involving MJ after her memory had been erased at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

"So he meets MJ a few years later. The circumstances are that he's Spider-Man, and he's talking to her, but basically he has to fall in with her to get in on this mystery. But in that version, he's not Spider-Man. He's pretending to be someone else," McKenna said.

The final film instead features Parker adopting the alias "Maynard" for similar purposes. Brand New Day still references the British Spider-Man concept when Ned mentions the possibility of Spider-Man being British while sharing his tracking device with Parker. The name Ben Reilly has recently appeared in Prime Video's Spider-Noir series, where Nicolas Cage's character uses it as an alias, though that show operates outside the MCU continuity.