It’s strange to think that, after a decade since his debut, Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle will finally make his big screen appearance, facing off against Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. While details about the wall-crawler's next chapter in the MCU are still being kept under wraps, one thing we do know is that Bernthal’s bruiser of a vigilante will have his own story coming to Disney+ soon after, as a special presentation.
Naturally, the expectation for a standalone Punisher story is that it will be a bloody outing and quite a departure from the relatively family-friendly environment he’ll share with Spider-Man. Well, that's what thought, at least. Fortunately, Bernthal has assured fans that Frank’s rage levels won’t differ between the two appearances. It’s a detail that not only he was set on sticking to, but also Tom Holland and the film’s director, Destin Daniel Cretton.
“Around that same time, there will also be this Punisher special that's coming out, that I think will be as high-octane Punisher as you've ever seen,” Bernthal promised in an interview with Screen Rant. “I think what was really important to me and to Destin and to Tom is that we believed that The Punisher could walk off of the Spider-Man set and could walk onto the special set, and I do believe that we achieved that.”
It wouldn’t be the first time the MCU has pulled off this sort of trick. Before Punisher crossed paths with the webslinger, Peter Parker unknowingly encountered Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), aka Daredevil, in Spider-Man: No Way Home. This introduction also teed up the Man Without Fear to make an appearance elsewhere in the franchise with She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. During his screen time on the Disney+ show, he might not have beaten the bad guys to the degree we’d seen before, but he was still clearly the horn-head we’d known, loved, and sorely missed.
Keeping this in mind, along with Cretton’s expert handling of action sequences in Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings, we should expect some great power-packed scraps between Frank and Spidey. We just hope Frank won’t end up in any worse state than the kind we’ve seen him in before. For every other upcoming MCU movie and show coming our way, check out our guide here.
