Spider-Man: Far From Home spoilers ahead…
Perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment in Spider-Man: Far From Home happens right at the very end during the second post-credits sequence. We see Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) drive away only to slowly transform into the shapeshifting Skrull Talos and his wife Soren, whom we previously met in Captain Marvel. It’s a neat trick pulled by the writers and directors, and one that makes sense if we pay attention to the bread crumbs dropped throughout the movie. This reveal is funny and put a big smile on all of our faces.
However, there was a point during pre-production where the writers wanted to push the Skrull concept even further by revealing — wait for it — MYSTERIO to be a Skrull. Recently, Collider.com got the chance to sit with Spider-Man: Far From Home writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Sommers said:
“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.”
As much as I love McKenna and Sommers, this could’ve been a step too far. Mysterio revealing himself to be not a superhero from an alternate universe but one of Tony Stark’s underappreciated former employees is one of the best plot points of the film. It’s difficult to imagine Mysterio being as effective of a villain if he revealed himself to be a Skrull. But, it looks like that wasn’t even a concrete idea to begin with. McKenna said:
“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.”
Spider-Man: Far From Home is currently playing in Malaysian cinemas.
