Spider-Man: Far from Home could have been just another Marvel movie; perfectly fine without making too many waves. Tell a fun story and be on its merry way. What it actually turns out to be is one of the most surprising Marvel movies yet, with more twists and shocking reveals than I think any of us were expecting. The two post-credit scenes, in particular, could cast the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a whole new light, especially for your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
So you've been warned about SPOILERS, already. If you're still reading that's on you.
Let's start with the first mid-credit sequence, which reveals that Spider-Man's victory over Mysterio was hardly the end of the villain's effect on his life. Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) has already been revealed to be a villain posing as a hero, and is eventually defeated by Spidey who learns to overcome his disorienting illusions. However, there was a backup plan that may or may not have been Mysterio's, but it's soon revealed to the entire world that Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. And the news is delivered via an InfoWars-esque website TheDailyBugle.net, with J.K. Simmons (!!!) returning as J. Jonah Jameson, who has gone full-blown Alex Jones.
How in the world does a secret like this stay under cover? What did it take for Jameson to reprise his fan-favorite role from the Sam Raimi trilogy of Spider-Man flicks? Speaking with Collider, director Jon Watts says it all came down to exact timing...
“So we waited until the very, very last second and called [Simmons] up, and he came by and he was, ‘Wait, what? You want me to do what?’ It took him a second to understand, but as we pitched the idea he was totally on board and he really loved getting to be the person who finally outs Peter Parker,” said Watts.
I expect this will be a practice going forward because damn it really worked well this time. Nobody had a clue about Simmons coming back, because if it had leaked the last few months would have been spent speculating how the MCU is connected to Raimi's movies. Now that it's been revealed, Watts knows those theories are out there. When asked about it, he said...
“Definitely it raises some very interesting questions. I don’t know that I have answers for them just yet. But, yeah, it does open up some strange possibilities by having him be the same person.”
He followed that up with "all options are on the table" when asked whether it had been discussed with Kevin Feige. Hmm?
That's not all, though, because the second scene opens up a ton of questions about the status of Nick Fury and whether anything we've seen of him in the MCU has been legit. It's revealed that the Nick Fury and Maria Hill we've been following for the entire movie were actually Talos and Soren, the husband/wife duo of Skrulls we first met in Captain Marvel. Not only that, but Fury is found to be up in deep space aboard a space station full of Skrulls.
Was this a way of introducing SWORD, the intergalactic counterpart to SHIELD? How long has Nick Fury been up there? When was the swap made? Have we ever met the real Nick Fury? And where the heck is Maria Hill?
Rather than let fans twist in the wind on this, Watts reveals to Comicbook.com that Fury was on Earth fairly recently, so we haven't been without him too long...
"First of all, to clarify the timeline, that's real Nick Fury at Tony's funeral at the end of [Avengers: Endgame]. So it's not like he's been a Skrull forever or like, it's not like he's been a Skrull since Captain Marvel. We were going to have him eat diagonal toast cut diagonally. You know that one? That would've given it away."
He's talking about Fury's inability to eat toast that has been cut diagonally, a strange quirk we learned in Captain Marvel.
Watts adds that his motivation for doing this was to show that even Fury could be duped by someone like Mysterio, and that revelation shows that everything is up for grabs right now in this post-Endgame MCU.
"There's such a history of Nick Fury and the Skrulls, especially now that people have seen Captain Marvel and they've seen what is happening with those stories in the MCU. But to me it was always just this fundamental question of how could [Mysterio] actually fool Nick Fury? Because Nick Fury's super power is being suspicious, you know?"
"It always sort of bothered me even though we knew that that's what we wanted the story to be, that Nick Fury could get duped even though he's been gone for five years and he's on his back foot. I wanted to come up with one last little reveal that could explain that unanswered question. And when you're making a con man movie, it just feels like the right thing to do to have one last little twist that makes you look at everything slightly differently."
