Spider-Man: Brand New Day Almost Featured an Obscure Marvel Villain

Spider-Man: Brand New Day pulls story threads from every corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fuel Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) most intimate outing yet. For instance, Mac Gargan (Michael Mando) returns as Scorpion, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) loses his grip on the Hulk for the first time in years, and Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) operates on the fringes of the story as the Punisher. Even Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) steps in from the New Avengers to help Peter track down information on the Department of Damage Control and its director, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman). In the end, Metzger’s quiet menace ties the entire film together, functioning as the true villain hiding behind the rampage carried out by Jean Grey (Sadie Sink). His presence in the finished film feels inevitable, yet Metzger was reportedly not the character Marvel Studios originally built the movie around.

According to industry insider John Rocha (via Murphy’s Multiverse), the role ultimately filled by Metzger was originally written for a villain called the Leper Queen. Rocha reports that Marvel approached Carrie Coon, Nicole Kidman, and Sarah Snook for the part before all three passed, and that Anne Hathaway was also circled for the role and turned it down. Marvel Studios then pivoted the screenplay toward Metzger instead. It remains unclear whether the Leper Queen would have occupied the same position at Damage Control that Metzger fills in the finished film.

Who Is the Leper Queen?

In the comics, the Leper Queen is a deep-cut X-Men adversary who appeared in barely more than a dozen issues. The character, a woman known only as Page, watched her infant daughter manifest pyrokinetic mutant powers, which accidentally burned down their home, killing the child and permanently scarring Page’s own body. She channeled that grief into an all-consuming hatred of mutants, eventually founding a criminal empire tied to the deaths of hundreds of mutants and thousands of humans across her comic book history. Despite that staggering body count, the character remained a niche figure within Marvel’s sprawling rogues’ gallery, never crossing over into the mainstream storylines that built the modern X-Men mythology or its wider pop culture footprint. That obscurity makes her an unusual choice to have originally headlined a major Spider-Man blockbuster built around dramatic heavyweights like Hathaway, Coon, Kidman, and Snook.

Marvel’s decision to abandon the Leper Queen in favor of Metzger ultimately strengthens both Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the franchise’s broader trajectory. Metzger’s authority comes from Damage Control itself rather than a personal comic book vendetta, and that institutional threat has been building steadily since the agency’s introduction in Spider-Man: Homecoming and its expanded presence in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Ms. Marvel, and Wonder Man. As the MCU heads toward its live-action X-Men reboot, a government official fixated on capturing and controlling powered people offers a more obvious thread than a mutant-hunting villain resurrected from decades-old comic panels. Metzger’s obsession with metahuman control also positions Damage Control as a natural adversary for mutantkind, because even if the director is now a fugitive after the events of Brand New Day, he had dozens of people who supported his twisted vision into DODC. The swap also preserves the door for Hathaway or her fellow finalists to join the MCU in a future project that can better use their talents.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theaters.