Spider-Man: Far From Home‘s mid-credits scene dropped a major bombshell that Peter Parker will surely struggle to deal with when we next see him. After defeating Mysterio and sharing a swing through the city with M.J., our friendly neighborhood hero is stunned to find out that the villain has shared a posthumous video online framing him for the attack on London. What’s more, his secret identity is now revealed to the world.
This is such a massive twist that it’s interesting to find out that it went through a few different versions before the way things play out in the movie was settled on. While speaking with The New York Times, screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers revealed that they knew they wanted Peter’s identity to be outed but they weren’t sure at first how to do that. Initially, it happened during the film’s climax.
“We were wondering, ‘Are we going as deep as we need to at the end of the movie?’ We played with the idea that Peter is the one who sacrifices his identity out of necessity during the final battle, then it seemed more interesting if Mysterio tricks him into doing it, but any time we wrote a version where he was being revealed to the world in that battle, it felt like it diminished the victory. So before it became a tag, it was really just the end of the movie: Right as he feels he’s stepping up as Spider-Man, he has the rug pulled out from under him again.”
Then the idea of Mysterio framing Spider-Man for his crimes – much like the villain does in his first ever comic book appearance – came into their heads. Sommers went on to say that they tossed around which one of these twists to tackle before ultimately deciding on both, just to make Peter’s life as turbulent as possible.
“We were definitely debating, should we just reveal who Spider-Man is, or should we frame him for something and turn him into a pariah? Ultimately, we decided that both was the way to go. It’s such a triumph at the end because he’s got the girl and finally earned a big swing through the city, so we want to knock him down as far as possible.”
That was surely the right move, as both of these two game-changing developments promise that Spider-Man 3 will raise the stakes higher than ever before for the web-head. Will he have to go on the run? Will he be imprisoned in the Raft? Will he need a superhero lawyer like Matt Murdock, maybe? Time will tell, but we can’t wait to find out.