SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Writers Reveal Claire Temple’s Cut Scene and and Why Yelena Made the Cut

Rosario Dawson nearly made her MCU comeback in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but the scene featuring Claire Temple never survived the final edit.

Now writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have cleared up what actually happened in the deleted sequence, and it’s quite different from the rumors that have been making the rounds.

The writers also opened up about Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and why she became part of Peter Parker’s latest adventure, along with that mysterious Spider-Tracker post-credits scene and a scrapped TVA idea that apparently predates the organization’s MCU debut.

McKenna and Sommers have also been working on Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, but they recently spoke with The Wrap about Spider-Man’s latest MCU outing and some of the material that ended up on the cutting-room floor.

One of the biggest questions involved Dawson’s Claire Temple. Reports had suggested that Claire appeared relatively late in the film, treating Peter Parker in the hospital and sharing a scene involving Spider-Man and The Punisher.

According to the writers, that isn’t what they filmed. Instead, Spider-Man sought out Claire, better known as the Night Nurse, for some much-needed medical attention after his vicious encounter with the Jean Grey-controlled Scorpion. Considering the punishment Peter takes during that fight, bringing Claire into the picture certainly makes sense.

McKenna had plenty of praise for Dawson and the deleted sequence: "Rosario Dawson is great. I wasn’t there for those discussions. But it was great. If anything, you have a movie that is two-and-a-half hours long, and it’s almost an embarrassment of riches with so many great characters and so many great scenes."

Sommers also confirmed that the Claire Temple scene worked well on its own. Its removal apparently had more to do with the overall shape and running time of the movie than anything being wrong with the sequence.

"The scene they did was a good scene. I think the only reason it’s not in the final cut was just that it was probably cut for time because it was very good."

The writers described Spider-Man’s encounter with Claire as "kind of a double beat" since it occurred shortly before Peter’s first meeting with Bruce Banner. When you’ve already got a two-and-a-half-hour Spider-Man movie filled with Marvel characters, trimming a scene that performs a similar story function is understandable, even if losing Dawson’s MCU return hurts a little.

While Claire didn’t make it into the finished movie, Yelena Belova was another matter entirely. There had been speculation that Pugh’s Black Widow was added to Spider-Man: Brand New Day as a way to build additional interest in the character ahead of Avengers: Doomsday.

McKenna and Sommers say that wasn’t the case. Yelena was part of their plans from early in the writing process, including the wonderfully weird banya sequence with Peter.

"We were talking about Yelena and then the idea that she’s in the banya and that he has to get in," Sommers recalled. "He won’t take his mask off. It was one of those things that made us all laugh, and then the next thing you know, it’s happening."

It’s exactly the kind of ridiculous situation that works for Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. Peter can fight supervillains, survive impossible situations, and throw himself into world-ending battles, yet put him in an uncomfortable social encounter and everything starts falling apart.

McKenna explained that the writers liked the scene so much that it survived every version of the screenplay. "It existed in every draft. We have to have the sequence. We just knew," McKenna noted.

"We felt like it’s always better to have him on his heels. Tom playing Spider-Man on his heels is just the dream. And her putting him on his heels just felt like, 'Oh, we gotta have this in the movie, even though we knew we could only have her probably for a little bit because of the Avengers timeline and everything."

The banya scene also plays with the fact that this version of Peter Parker isn’t the awkward high-school kid audiences first met in Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Peter is an adult now, and the filmmakers were clearly having some fun with that transition.

Asked about the sexual undertones of the scene, which puts a nude Yelena alongside Peter wearing only his mask and underwear, Sommers confirmed that Peter’s age was part of the conversation during development.

"That came up. It’s like, Can we? Should we? And then it was the same thing – it’s like, Well, he’s a big boy now."

Then there’s the ending. Spider-Man: Brand New Day leaves fans with a particularly strange post-credits scene involving the Spider-Tracker, which appears to locate a Spider-Man somewhere on another Earth. Naturally, that has kicked open the door to all kinds of multiverse theories about where Peter could be headed next.

McKenna isn’t giving anyone an easy answer. He described the scene as "fun" and offered this wonderfully unhelpful tease: "It's a little tease of something to come. Or maybe not. I don’t know," McKenna added that "it’s purposely vague."

So yes, Marvel wants everyone arguing about what it means. There’s also no guarantee that every post-credits concept the writers come up with eventually pays off. Sommers explained that he and McKenna have written plenty of stingers over the years that never reached audiences, including one especially interesting concept involving an organization that would later become a major piece of Marvel’s multiverse storytelling.

Sommers revealed that he once wrote "something involving Spider-Man the TVA" before the Time Variance Authority was officially introduced in Loki and later appeared in Deadpool & Wolverine. Based on the timeline, the idea was likely developed for Spider-Man: No Way Home.

That’s a pretty wild bit of Spider-Man MCU trivia. Peter Parker crossing paths with the TVA before audiences even knew who they were could have dramatically changed how No Way Home connected to Marvel’s larger multiverse story.

For now, the Spider-Tracker scene remains intentionally open-ended, while Claire Temple’s deleted appearance joins the growing pile of cool Marvel scenes that were filmed but couldn’t fit into the finished movie.

Hopefully, Dawson’s sequence eventually finds its way onto a home release or into Marvel’s deleted-scene archives because seeing Claire patch up Spider-Man after his brutal Scorpion fight sounds like something fans would have had a lot of fun with.

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