A scene in Marvel's new film Spider-Man: Brand New Day introduces a fresh way of thinking about the pecking order of heroes across the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ahead of the much-anticipated Avengers: Doomsday. In the scene, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), now operating as Black Widow within the New Avengers, dismisses a mind-controlling villain troubling Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as "baby potatoes" compared with the "big potatoes" her own team is tackling, offering a light-hearted but telling way of ranking threats by scale rather than by traditional power levels.

The framing plays on Marvel's long-standing split between street-level heroes, such as Daredevil and Luke Cage, and world-threatening dangers tackled by the Avengers, noting that Spider-Man has often been pulled between the two categories in previous films, including Homecoming, Far From Home and No Way Home. Brand New Day initially returns Peter to grounded, neighbourhood-level crime-fighting against foes like Scorpion and Tombstone, but the stakes escalate as Yelena later reassesses the threat as "slightly bigger potatoes" once it emerges that Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) is able to control the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), hinting at how the film sets up the wider power structure heading into Doomsday.