Andrew Garfield addresses Spider-Man return after Brand New Day teases Avengers crossover

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has already teased another return for the web-slinger, while its final moments appear to point towards a much bigger Avengers crossover.

Tom Holland’s fourth solo MCU outing follows Peter Parker after the world has forgotten he exists, leaving him to rebuild his life without MJ and Ned knowing who he is.

Although the film spends much of its runtime dealing with Peter’s struggles in New York, it saves one of its biggest hints for the very end.

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

There is no mid-credits scene, but the post-credits sequence brings back Ned’s Spidey Tracker app. It searches for Spider-Man before the map pulls away from Queens, then Earth, eventually placing the hero somewhere in deep space.

That has naturally sparked questions over whether Holland’s Peter could next appear in Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars. However, it’s now Andrew Garfield’s response to the tease that’s getting some attention.

Asked by ScreenRant whether he knew anything about the off-world Spider-Man, Garfield said: “I do not. First I’ve heard of it.”

Before the interviewer and Garfield cheekily referenced the ‘not the werewolf’ meme — the phrase Garfield previously used numerous times to deny he was part of Holland’s last Spidey film, No Way Home — the actor iterated he was not aware of the post-credit scene, and that it was the ‘first [he’d] heard of it’.

The conversation then turned to Tobey Maguire, with Garfield told that if the mystery Spider-Man was not him, it must be his fellow No Way Home co-star.

He replied: “I guess so. It could be. Who knows? Or maybe Miles Morales. I don’t know.”

The answer does not confirm Garfield, Maguire, or the Miles Morales character for any upcoming Marvel project, but that is unlikely to stop fans from looking for hidden meaning.

Garfield famously spent months denying that he would return in Spider-Man: No Way Home before appearing alongside Holland and Maguire, meaning viewers may not take his latest denial entirely at face value.

The Brand New Day scene itself also leaves plenty deliberately unexplained, though. It does not make clear why Spider-Man is in space, when he left Earth, or whether the tracker has even found Holland’s version of the character.

Still, the setting has led many to believe it could be setting up a crossover with the Avengers, especially as the sequence ends with the familiar message: “Spider-Man will return.”

That theory is helped by Mark Ruffalo, who returned as Bruce Banner in Brand New Day, previously making a bold promise about Spider-Man’s future.

During promotion for the film in Italy, Ruffalo said: “I promise you 1,000 percent that he [Spider-Man] will be fighting an alien in the future.”

Miles Morales has also become part of the discussion outside Garfield, mentioning him, too.

In an interview with 1LIVE (reported by MovieWeb), Holland recently revealed that he knows when the character will appear; as part of a reverse-question tactic by the interviewer — asking Holland what he himself would ask as a Spider-Man fan, the current on-screen Peter Parker answered: “I guess it would be, ‘When will we get Miles Morales?’ would be the question I would ask, because I know the answer.”

Whilst Garfield’s denial paints another picture of potentially being involved as his own Spider-Man again, but keeping it secret, we likely won’t see anything now until at least Avengers: Doomsday comes out this December — or we hear more about Secret Wars, which is coming a year later.