Chameleon was almost the villain of Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Brand New Day writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers said as much in the August 12 episode of The Q&A With Jeff Goldsmith, where spoilers and interesting and not-so-interesting behind-the-scenes revelations were shared. Some are non-starters, like Goldsmith addressing the rumor that Anne Hathaway was once attached to the project (neither writer could confirm it), but the conversation soon became a bit more interesting when it shifted to who nearly was the villain of Brand New Day before Jean Grey’s ginger locks popped into their minds.  

More interesting than even that is the energy and style McKenna and Sommers envisioned for Brand New Day in their earliest drafts, which would have always centered on Parker’s biological spider-changes: A street-level, mad-bomber-style story that included Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher, something like a Marvel-ed-up Die Hard With A Vengeance—which is, if you squint, kind of what the finished product has in brief, fleeting moments. “Can we just do a Spider-Man story that was set in New York, that was ground-level New York where you had a mysterious, like, bomber, a villain who was like basically toying with Spider-Man,” McKenna says. “Eric and I [tried] to envision a villain that would sort of fit that bill, and we were thinking, ‘God, what’s a Spider-Man classic villain that no one has really done in the films?'”

One issue the writers ran into—aside from the obvious, which we’ll get to—was how to convey Chameleon’s face-changing abilities in a way that’s visually exciting. “How do we do that?” McKenna continued. “They’ve done Skrulls; you’re not going to do masks—how do we do that? And then we hit upon the idea of mind control. What if Chameleon was using mind control?” And while the idea of automatically nixing masks—the characters’ trademark—in favor of turning one of Spider-Man’s more unique villains into, let’s say, a Mysterio 2.0 or a super-hypnotist or whatever, really takes the sting out of the characters’ big-screen prospects, the fact is that Dmitri Nikolayevich Smerdyakov’s day in the MCU proper was never meant to be. “[Sony] had already used Dmitri, Kraven’s half-brother, in Kraven,” McKenna finished. “So it was like, aargh, you couldn’t do Chameleon—but that’s what got us on the path of mind control.” You have to hand it to Sony’s Kraven The Hunter: It’s still somehow wreaking havoc on the fabric of reality. 

You can listen to the Chameleonic bits around the 14:30 mark: