Spoilers forSpider-Man: Far from Homefollow below.
One of the major themes of the Marvel sequelSpider-Man: Far from Homeis deception. Not only is Peter Parker (Tom Holland) trying to deceive his friends (and love interest), keeping his Spider-Man secret intact, but the film’s villain Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) isallabout deception. First introduced as an ally from another dimension, teaming up with Spider-Man to defeat monstrous Elementals, Mysterio is eventually revealed to be the film’s Big Bad. But instead of the special effects wizard of the comics, inFar from HomeMysterio is a disgruntled Stark Industries employee who bands together with fellow Tony Stark haterz to seize control of tech known as E.D.I.T.H., which has been bequeathed to Peter by the dearly departed Tony Stark. Mysterio has no powers at all, and in fact his show of heroism is crafted solely using Stark Industries technology.
But in a very early version ofSpider-Man: Far from Home, there was one more major reveal when it came to Mysterio: he was skrull. In the finished version ofFar from Home, we learn at the end of the film that the Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) we’ve been watching are actually skrulls Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and Soren (Sharon Blynn), while the real Nick Fury is on a vacation on a skrull ship.
When I spoke withFar from HomescreenwritersChris McKennaandErik Sommersrecently, I asked the two about crafting the skrulls reveal, and Sommers teased that a very early version of the movie featured Mysterio as a skrull:
“There were some early, early versions of this movie where Mysterio was a Skrull… There were a lot of Skrull versions of the story early on. When you’re doing a con artist movie, what we finally landed on—we sat down and talked about how do we keep on fooling the audience, how do we keep on having a lot of fun reveals? How many distractions can we get away with before people want to murder us? [The Mysterio skrull reveal] was an early idea about why he was doing everything he was doing.”
McKenna added that the idea didn’t get very far, but is indicative of how the twists and turns of this movie were created:
“I don’t think it ever made it to paper, necessarily, but we talked about it for a while. But we talked about a lot of stuff. We spent a lot of time in a windowless room with [director] Jon [Watts], and the folks from Marvel and Pascal Pictures, just talking it through. That’s what it is, in those early stages. It’s just a lot of talk. Going down different roads and just gradually refining things until you have a story.”
And indeed, there weremanyother roads discussed forFar from Home. Look for my full interview with McKenna and Sommers on Collider soon.
For more onSpider-Man: Far from Home, click on the links to our recent coverage below:
