Scorpion’s been in every trailer. Tombstone hasn’t been in a single frame. That’s not an oversight — that’s a choice, and it might be the most revealing thing Marvel has done with Brand New Day‘s marketing so far.
Reliable Marvel insider Alex Perez of The Cosmic Circus was asked in an April Q&A which villain in Brand New Day, besides Scorpion, is “very crucial to the narrative as a whole.” His answer was immediate: “Tombstone. Definitely Tombstone.” That quote, confirmed and published this week, reframes everything about how this film is actually structured.
Because here’s what makes that interesting. Perez isn’t just saying Tombstone has a big role in this movie. He’s previously gone further — explicitly calling Lonnie Lincoln the “overarching” villain of Peter Parker’s next MCU trilogy. Not a film villain. A trilogy villain. The Thanos to Holland’s next chapter.
And you haven’t seen him in a single piece of official marketing.
Tombstone debuted in Web of Spider-Man #36 back in 1988, the creation of Gerry Conway and artist Alex Saviuk. He was conceived as something the Spider-Man rogues gallery had been missing: a villain who wasn’t primarily a physical threat, but a presence. An albino crime enforcer who’d grown up alongside Daily Bugle editor Robbie Robertson — who once witnessed Lincoln commit murder, said nothing, and spent twenty years living with that silence. That guilt, and what Tombstone does with it, is the engine of some of the most psychologically interesting Spider-Man stories of the late 80s.
The powers came later. When Robertson finally tried to do the right thing and confront Tombstone, the confrontation ended with Lonnie accidentally exposed to an experimental chemical gas called Diox-3 — and what emerged on the other side had bulletproof skin, superhuman strength, and absolutely no inclination to forgive anyone. The comics version of Tombstone can take hits from Spider-Man for an entire issue without staggering. He’s not trying to destroy the world. He just wants to own New York’s underworld, quietly, for as long as possible.
That last part is what makes him so well-suited to be the foundation villain of a new trilogy. He doesn’t need a big reveal moment. He operates from the shadows. Perez noted in the same Q&A that “lots of people are weaving their webs from the shadows” in Brand New Day — and that he wasn’t allowed to discuss who’s behind the Hand’s involvement in the story. Read that alongside Tombstone being identified as the film’s second most crucial villain, and the throughline becomes pretty clear. The Hand isn’t the threat. The Hand works for someone.
Now here’s the detail nobody’s been sitting with long enough.
There’s a voice in the Brand New Day trailer — calm, deliberate, slightly unsettling — delivering the line: “Spiders have three life cycles.” It belongs to Keith David. You might know him from Gargoyles, from The Thing, from what feels like half of all prestige American television. But Spider-Man fans know Keith David specifically because he voiced Tombstone in The Spectacular Spider-Man‘s pilot episode — the 2008 animated series that remains one of the most beloved adaptations of the character ever put on screen, a version that reimagined Tombstone as New York’s most powerful crime lord hiding in plain sight as a philanthropist.
That version of Tombstone — the public face of respectability concealing total criminal control — is almost certainly the template the MCU is using here. And if Keith David is in the trailer and Tombstone is the second most crucial villain in the film, it doesn’t feel like a stretch to suggest those two facts are related.
Whether David is actually playing Lonnie Lincoln in live-action, or whether the MCU has cast someone else and just used David for narration, or whether that trailer voice is something else entirely — Perez wouldn’t confirm. But the creative decision to use that voice, if intentional, is Marvel closing a loop with the animated version that defined this character for an entire generation of fans who grew up on The Spectacular Spider-Man.
What makes Tombstone work as a long-game villain — the reason Perez is calling him the overarching threat for three films — is that he doesn’t operate like most Spider-Man villains. He doesn’t have a personal grudge against Peter Parker. He doesn’t know who Spider-Man is. He’s simply in the business of controlling New York’s criminal infrastructure, and Spider-Man keeps interfering with that business. That’s a sustainable conflict. That’s a setup you can build a trilogy around without collapsing it into a personal revenge story every installment.
The fact that he hasn’t appeared in Brand New Day‘s marketing isn’t a sign that his role is small. It might be the opposite. Marvel kept Thanos out of Age of Ultron‘s marketing too.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits theaters July 31. We’ll update this as more details emerge.