Spider-Man: Brand New Day Post-Credits Scene Explained: Full Breakdown

Contains spoilers for "Spider-Man: Brand New Day"

After a five-year wait, Spider-Man's return to our screens is being heralded as the best Spidey movie in decades, putting Peter Parker (Tom Holland) back on a path towards rebuilding the relationships with best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) that he made them forget.

Yes, the appearance of Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) is the next step in the path towards rebooting the X-Men within the MCU, and Peter's Universal Inhibitor could be a major threat if any villain gets their hands on it, but the movie itself closes out on a smaller, personal note. After another near-death experience, and a heartbreaking realization that MJ can't remember their relationship, we are at least left with a sign that things could possibly get back to how they were before Doctor Strange's spell was cast for Peter and his friends, as Ned remembers their secret handshake and Peter's name.

There's a lot to unpack there, but for those of you who wait around for an extra 10 or so minutes, there are even more questions raised about the character's future. After assuming we'd next see Peter live up to Aunt May's (Marisa Tomei) suggestion that he doesn't need to do this alone anymore, reconnecting with Ned as a result, the post-credits scene throws the idea of him staying and fighting crime in New York out the window altogether. We don't know for sure when we'll next see Spidey onscreen, but this brief post-credits tease leaves a few clues that we'll unpack below.

After the long wait through the end credits, with the Sony logos appearing at the end to make you think there won't be a post-credits scene, the last thing we see is the UI of Ned's Spider-Man tracker app. It first shows that Spidey is still at home in Queens, until the map begins to zoom out, with the tracker glitching and losing his whereabouts as it pulls back so far we've arrived in outer space.

Far away from Earth — so far out that our planet is no longer visible — it regains the connection, and we see that Spider-Man's location is in some undisclosed location in the cosmos. And then, with our hero even further from home than ever before, the screen cuts to black, with the message "Spider-Man Will Return" the last thing we see before leaving the theater.

It leaves us with a lot more questions than answers, especially as we currently don't know when Spider-Man will be back on our screens. Tom Holland has said he'll keep playing the role for as long as Marvel will have him, but a fifth film hasn't been officially announced — and he also hasn't been listed as part of the cast for either upcoming "Avengers" movie, which adds a few question marks to what this post-credits scene is setting up.

Based on the deep space setting, it brings an appearance in "Doomsday" or "Secret Wars" back on the table as a possibility. The emotional pre-credits finale suggests that his relationships with Ned and MJ will be crucial to a fifth movie, which probably won't work as well if he's been transported to outer space.

While an unannounced appearance in this December's "Avengers: Doomsday" can't be ruled out just yet, the most obvious implication of the "Brand New Day" post-credits scene is that Tom Holland's web slinger will play a part in "Avengers: Secret Wars," currently scheduled for release in December 2027.

In the 2015 iteration of that comic book storyline, an incredibly powerful Doctor Doom has created his own patchwork planet called Battleworld, built from pieces of various Earths from the destroyed multiverse, and brings heroes and villains from different universes together to fight. This initially seems like the most straightforward explanation, but the tracker doesn't show Spidey leaving our universe, just transported to the far reaches of it, whereas Battleworld is its own, self-contained universe. The lore could change for the big screen, of course, and "Doomsday" will likely end with Robert Downey Jr's supervillain creating it.

As the tracker doesn't explicitly say Spider-Man has left our universe, there's also the possibility he's been beamed aboard a spaceship that's ventured into ours — could this be the Fantastic Four, who were shown entering into our dimension in the "Thunderbolts*" post-credits scene? That's one way of subtly announcing that Holland will be a part of "Doomsday" after all, although why he'd need to be beamed up by Reed Richards and company is anybody's guess.

It has been revealed that "Brand New Day" takes place shortly before "Doomsday" within the MCU timeline, but there's no measure of the time that's passed between the movie and this post-credits sting — it's almost surely setting up one of the two "Avengers" movies, but which one will be up for debate for a little while longer.

One of the most compelling theories we've read so far argues that the glitching of the tracking app is deliberately misleading: Earth-616's Peter Parker could be safely at home in Queens, while a different iteration could be crash-landing into this universe. We know that Doctor Doom will be bringing incursions — the cosmic event in Marvel lore where two universes collide, with both getting destroyed if one doesn't end the other within eight hours — into this universe. We've already had the two previous live-action iterations of Peter Parker walk through a portal into the MCU, so it's not unreasonable to expect either Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield to return — there's already a fan rumor that Maguire's Spidey will fight the X-Men in "Doomsday," after all.

Another suggestion, which would more likely set up a "Spider-Man 5" plotline than hint at Tom Holland's involvement in the next "Avengers" outing, is that the tracker has detected a symbiote which has previously bonded with Spider-Man out in the cosmos. This is a lot more tenuous, but worth mentioning just in case this is a very deliberate misdirect to put us off the scent of where we'll see the character next. Realistically, all signs seem to point towards an appearance in at least one of the next "Avengers" movies, and with Marvel CCO Kevin Feige teasing that the cast is a lot larger than what they've revealed, we shouldn't be too shocked if and when we see Peter Parker's face again.