Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Far from Home blew open the 4th of July box office with $185 million in its first week, a great showing for a franchise that had seemingly reached its prime and left it in the rearview mirror with the attempted 2012 reboot. When Marvel Studios and President Kevin Feige got involved along with former Sony Pictures Chairperson Amy Pascal transitioning to producer, things seemed to work out, as Sony was able to share Tom Holland‘s Peter Parker/Spider-Man with the MCU, thereby allowing the likes of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark and Samuel L. Jackson‘s Nick Fury to be involved in the Spider-verse.
Spider-Man: Far from Home offered lots of surprises and was fairly well-reviewed, but it also left open a LOT of questions about what happens to Peter Parker after this, as well as hinting at what we might see in the MCU going into Phase 4.
While I personally had a chance to talk with director Jon Watts a few weeks back, I wasn’t really able to get into too much spoiler territory nor was I able to confirm what villain he might want to follow Michael Keaton‘s The Vulture and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Mysterio.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person who got to talk to Watts and Feige as they and co-producer Amy Pascal did interviews with other outlets as well. Now that the “spoiler embargo” is up, the stories are blowing up all over the place, and I decided to put together a “Best of” some of the quotes out there.
In case you missed it in the title, there’s a SPOILER WARNING from this point on, because if you haven’t seen Spider-Man: Far from Home yet (or even Avengers: Endgame!), you really should do so before reading about some of the bigger spoiler moments, including two very cool post-credit scenes.
Let’s start with the possible villain for the next Spider-Man movie, and that comes from Mike Ryan at Uproxx, who had much better luck getting an answer from Watts to that question.
“I mean, it opens up so many possibilities,” Watts said, “But no, I don’t know who’s next. I always like to think about it in terms of what’s going to be the most difficult thing for Peter. So that’s going to be the next trick. I always just try to start with what haven’t we seen before? And there’s so many Spider-Man villains.”
When pressed, though, Watts went with the idea of Kraven the Hunter, another classic Spidey-villain we have yet to see in the movies.“Oh, I would love Kraven. It’s just the trick of how do you do Kraven in a movie?,” he told Ryan.
The L.A. Times also had a fairly lengthy feature on Spider-Man: Far from Home‘s two end credit sequences, as well as getting thoughts from Tom Holland, Feige and Watts about Peter’s journey in the movie. Most of it is fairly standard lip service about the movie’s connections to Endgame and Tony Stark’s death.
The most interesting tidbit from that story is Feige saying, “We’ve been working on [Phase 4] for the last four years. As we’ve been producing these films, we’ve been developing and planning the next group of films and looking to continue to surprise [fans] and bring characters to the screen that are very different from any characters before and that people, unless they’re really hard-core comic fans, may not have heard of.”
That’s mainly a breakthrough, because Feige has been keeping so quiet about what happens post-Endgame, specifically in Phase 4, in order to “surprise fans.” We know some movies that are already in development or production like Black Widow and The Eternals, as well as plans for sequels to Doctor Strange, Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy, but we know next to nothing about the stories, titles, release dates or much else.
From the same piece, Watts talks about the last end credit sequence, when we learn that Nick Fury is actually Ben Mendelsohn’s Skrull Talos and that Fury himself is on a spaceship teaming with Skrulls. Watts does give a little more insight into what’s going on there:
“For me, the biggest benefit is it explains how Mysterio could fool Nick Fury because Fury’s superpower is suspicion and yet he’s fooled by Mysterio,” he says, and as far as where Fury is in that last shot? “It’s definitely a Skrull spaceship. But I don’t know if I can specifically say where they are. They’re in space. He’s on a mission, but he got to take a very brief vacation on this little relaxation pod.”
Lastly, we have another lengthy piece over at IO9 from Germain Lussier, who spoke to some of the same parties. He spoke specifically with Feige about the final status for Peter Parker at the end of Far from Home with his secret identity revealed and Mysterio tricking people into thinking Spider-Man is a killer.
“Peter is back in a position that is very familiar to comic fans which is being in New York City and revered as a villain by the press and by other aspects of the city,” Feige told him. “The best thing about it is it forces you to do something different and unique in the next installment. That’s one of the fun things about the ending … whatever comes next, it will be unlike anything that has come before.”
Feige adds, “The story we wanted to tell [is] to set up Peter for a new spin on a very classic Spider-Man conceit that you haven’t seen since the Raimi movies, which is J. Jonah Jameson and the notion of this very loud-mouth journalist spouting hate towards him, the twist of Mysterio winning … and pulling one last trick so that the public now believes, or at least the news is reporting, that he was responsible for the acts that Mysterio did.”
Pascal explained how they got J.K. Simmons (who became an Oscar winner for Whiplash since his stint as Jameson) to return as the head of The Daily Bugle for that end credits scene: “For him to come back and do another version of that character, which is a contemporary television conspiracy theorist in the new world of media, perfectly fit with what we’re trying to say for the entire franchise. Of course, he’s brilliant and he understood that immediately.”
Let us know what you think about the future of Spider-Man and the MCU in the comments. Have any ideas on who should play Kraven the Hunter? Leave that in the comments as well.
We’re less than two weeks away from San Diego Comic-Con and the 90-minute Marvel Studios panel where Kevin Feige may or may not reveal what’s coming up for the MCU, so the above is really just a big tease. Also, if you want to know more about what we think of various Spider-Man movie villains, check out my “Ultimate Ranking of Spider-Man Villains.”
