Every Power Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey Has in Spider-Man: Brand New Day

After months of Marvel refusing to confirm anything, Spider-Man: Brand New Day finally revealed that Sadie Sink is playing Jean Grey. This is not the Jean most fans know, though. This version of the character hasn’t met Professor X yet, so she isn’t officially an X-Man yet.

She is a scared teenager who has never met another mutant apart from her sister Sara, and the only training she ever got was a rushed lesson in a flashback before Damage Control took Sara away.

That makes her far weaker than her comic book self, at least at first. By the end of the film, though, she is doing things no MCU character has done before. Here is every power she shows off.

Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey Uses Mind Hopping to Control People

Sadie Sink as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day | Credits: Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures Releasing

For the first half of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Jean is not even on screen. She is a threat that Tom Holland‘s Peter Parker cannot see, because she attacks him through other people’s bodies. Her main power here is mind hopping. She slips into someone’s head and then drives them like a car, before jumping to the next person.

Jean talks through them, fights through them, and sees through their eyes. The host, meanwhile, blacks out completely and remembers nothing afterwards. This was the only power that her sister taught her before Damage Control took her away.

Peter figures out one big catch in her power. She can only jump into a mind that is within about 33 feet of her. However, she gets around the limit by chaining, and even manages to jump into the minds of MJ, Frank Castle, and Bruce Banner. In the latter’s mind, she unleashed the Hulk onto Spider-Man. Her mind control mixed with teleportation is what makes her one of the most powerful telepaths.

Jean’s Powers Evolve and She Freezes a Part of New York City

Sadie Sink as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day | Credits: Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures Releasing

Bill Metzger gets Jean Grey locked in a cell, with help from Peter Parker’s inhibitor device. Jean is trapped in a glass room, with Metzger watching experiments on her safely from beyond the 33 ft. However, when Jean realizes that her sister Sara Grey died in the very same room during Metzger’s experiments, her powers evolve.

In the comics, the X-gene usually wakes up during moments of extreme pain, and that is exactly what happens here. Jean has a second mutation on the spot. She shatters the containment glass with her mind and takes out Metzger’s entire team. She drags Metzger across the room without touching him, and holds a floating shard of glass against his throat. That is full telekinesis, arriving out of nowhere.

She also manages to bring everything within a large radius of Manhattan around inside her psychic bubble, that freezes everyone. On top of all this, Jean is controlling a room full of Hand ninjas and fighting Spider-Man at the same time.

Jean Grey Breathes For Peter Parker to Save Him

Sadie Sink as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day | Credits: Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures Releasing

The film’s best use of Jean’s power is during the final minutes of the movie, when Peter gets shot saving her. Before this scene, Peter lets her walk into his head, and she sees Aunt May telling him what being special actually means. That moment lands, and it changes her.

So when he takes a bullet for her, she breathed for him. She stayed linked to him the entire time he was unconscious and breathed for him, holding his body steady until he could manage on his own. When she finally breathes, Peter wakes up in his hospital bed. He cheerfully calls it her voodoo magic.

It is the first time we see her powers used to sustain a life instead of hijack one, and it is a huge hint at the healer she becomes in the comics.

Jean Grey May Have Helped Restore Ned and MJ’s Memories

Zendaya and Jacob Batalon as MJ and Ned Leeds in Spider-Man: Brand New Day | Credits: Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures Releasing

Jean Grey’s telepathic powers also come with the ability to bring out repressed or erased memories. It is already canon in the Fox movies, where Famke Janssen’s character touches Wolverine’s head to bring back certain memories. Initially in the movie, Sadie Sink’s character uses the memories she finds inside people. In the film’s cruellest moment, she wears MJ’s face and lets Peter believe MJ finally remembers him.

When she later taps into the Hulk’s mind, it brings back the savage Hulk, whom Bruce Banner had suppressed through his years of scientific work since the Infinity War events. The ending of the movie leaves one thread hanging, and fans have already landed on Jean as the answer.

Peter runs into Ned at a bodega, does their old secret handshake without thinking, and Ned says his name. After a whole film built on nobody remembering Peter exists, that was enormous. The popular theory is that during the psychic bubble, she was holding both Peter and the crowd at once, with Ned and MJ caught inside her radius.

This may have surfaced memories in both Ned and MJ. A couple of visual hints in the movie show MJ crying when frozen, and later show her holding on to the Black Dahlia necklace Peter gave her. Nothing here is confirmed, but the pieces fit a little too neatly.

Do you think Jean’s powers are unlike anything the MCU has ever created before? Let us know in the comments below!

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now running in theaters!