Spider-Man: Far From Home mid- and end-credits explained

Spider-Man: Far From Home has not one but two end-credits scenes. And they have huge ramifications for the MCU.

Be honest, when you didn’t get an end credits stinger in Avengers: Endgame, you felt just a little bit gypped.

It’s goddamn tradition.

So you’ll be please to know that there is not one, but two extra scenes at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home. Phew, order has been restored.

One comes during the mid-credits after the animated sequence scored to the Go-Gos’ Vacation. The other is at the very, very end, after the logos for Marvel and for Pascal Pictures.

Stay for them because they’re absolute rippers. It’s not a cheeky PSA with Captain America extolling the virtues of patience — which, even with your full bladder, was still hilarious.

These two stingers not only sets up future Marvel Cinematic Universe instalments, one of them also up-ends everything you just saw in the preceding two hours.

Huge.

Read on and allow us to explain.

Cute.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (PLUS AVENGERS: ENDGAME AND CAPTAIN MARVEL)

What do we make of these mid- and end-credit scenes? What significance do they have?

The mid-credits scene is more self-explanatory and a direct pick-up from MJ and Peter swinging through mid-town Manhattan.

Setting down in front of Madison Square Garden, the big screen behind them comes to life with a major news update in which a news bulletin runs footage manipulated by Quentin Beck’s mate-in-crime William to make it seem as if Spider-Man was the villain of the attack in London and that Peter had killed Beck.

It’s a perfect capper to a movie that has captured Beck’s whole Wizard of Oz (green) smoke and mirrors crusade to control the truth. You know what they say about us living in a post-truth world?

As Beck intoned to his minions, “It’s totally ridiculous but exactly what people will believe right now.”

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Beck lied about multiverses.

He’s talking about a world in which aliens and superheroes exist and where half the population was snapped away for five years. But he could easily be talking about our world.

Beck is the perfect Marvel villain for 2019.

But the best thing about the mid-credits scenes is the return of a familiar face to the Spider-Man screen universe: J.K. Simmons, who reprises his role as J. Jonah Jameson.

Simmons played Jameson, the blowhard news man with a grudge against Spider-Man, in the three Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies.

Jameson as the “anchor” of the “controversial” dailybugle.net is also perfect for 2019.

And of course he should be the one to expose Peter’s secret identity — it’s the closest we’ll ever get to the unfailingly polite superhero swearing.

Simmons’ presence here is logic-defying and potentially sets up a weird universe-colliding event — how can the same character played by the same actor be in two iterations of Spider-Man?!

More likely, it’s just a fun nod to the fans. If Simmons ends up in more MCU movies, it’s unlikely his “past” experiences with Maguire’s Spider-Man will be considered canon, because that’s just totally bonkers.

J.K. Simmons returns as J. Jonah Jameson

Now, the end-credits scene is the more fascinating of the two, and not just because it’s actually the biggest twist of the movie, even if it had no direct impact on this story.

Yes, the “Beck is a bad guy” thing is also a twist, but Mysterio is a villain in the comics, so his duplicity wouldn’t have been a massive shock for a decent portion of moviegoers.

The real jaw-dropping moment of the movie is the reveal that we haven’t been watching Nick Fury and Maria Hill this whole time. Whoa.

Instead, it’s been Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and a female lieutenant Skrull who has used the alien species’ shapeshifting powers to impersonate the former agents of SHIELD, and at the behest of Fury who’s been off-world on some secret Avengers mission.

Talos says to Fury on the phone, “Everyone kept asking me where the Avengers are and I don’t know what to say”. That totally clocks with the scene earlier in the movie where Peter asks where Captain Marvel and Thor are.

There’s a clue in that scene between Peter, Fury and Beck when Fury is explaining multiverses (which turns out to be a total lie made up by Beck).

Not Nick Fury and Maria Hill

In the trailer, Fury says to Peter, “Beck is from Earth, just not from ours.” Well, they obviously shot two versions of this scene because in the actual film, Fury says, “Beck is from Earth, just not YOURS.”

It’s a Freudian slip from Talos-as-Fury, because since Talos is a Skrull, he’s not from Earth. Hence, the YOURS instead of OURS.

Touche, Spider-Man.

But there’s more to this than shock value or the questions about what Talos has been doing in the 20-plus years between the 1990s-set Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home, or some meta-commentary about filmmaking and storytelling in general.

It also opens up the possibility of retconning previous MCU movies when we’ve seen Nick Fury - has he always been Fury or has Talos stepped in for him at other times in the past?

This is the scene that sets up the MCU’s Phase Four, or what it has got planned now that the so-called Infinity Saga is now officially over.

After Captain Marvel, there was fan speculation that the next big story arc Marvel has planned might be taken from the Secret Invasion storyline from the comics.

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In Secret Invasion, there was a Skrull plan to invade Earth by secretly replacing humans with their shapeshifted doppelgangers, leading to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust — who were themselves and who had been replaced?

But Captain Marvel has established the Skrulls as being kind of the good guys, especially compared to the blue-hued Kree (the Kree have also been the villains in MCU TV series Agents of SHIELD).

In an earlier scene in Far From Home, Fury (who we now know was Talos) says to not-Maria Hill, “I thought Kree having sleeper cells was top secret information.”

The Skrull-Kree war is a big part of the Marvel comics and it seems like it might be in the MCU in Phase Four and beyond.

Spider-Man: Far From Home is in cinemas now

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