Much like Spider-Man: Homecoming, the recently released Spider-Man: Far From Home kicks the story off with a homemade video from one of the characters. While it was Peter documenting his trip to Germany in the first film, the sequel starts with a news broadcast from Peter’s high school, essentially explaining the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. The students pay tribute to the heroes that died fighting Thanos, and get everyone up to speed on “The Blip,” which saw people disappear from existence only to return five years later.
Videos by ComicBook.com
There might not be a better or funnier way to break down the events of the previous films, and it was an idea that the creative team has had in the can for years. During an interview with ScreenRant, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and Far From Home director Jon Watts confirmed that the idea of the broadcast was put together when the ideas of Infinity War and Endgame were initially brought to Sony and the Spider-Man team.
“That was an idea very early on,” Feige began, “and I don’t remember how formal it was, but at some point we sat down with Jon and our writers [Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers] and with Amy [Pascal], and pitched them Infinity War and Endgame. We pitched them what would happen and the ideas of dealing with the loss of Tony, how different this blip is, how weird it is that it’s five years later and some people are older and some people aren’t. How much fun can that be?
“And I think it was probably Jon, or maybe the screenwriters, who was like, ‘Well, you know what we do? We start the movie off with school news just like we started the last film with Peter’s home movie of Civil War.’ And catch them up in a way that is funny, you can literally just spell out the information because it’s the morning news show. And we got more and more specific even as we kept working.”
According to Watts, the bit went even longer in its early iterations, recapping all sorts of different plot lines from Infinity War and Endgame. Ultimately, the only things kept were the necessary pieces to telling the story of the Blip.
“We shot twice as much as what’s in there, because we thought people were going to have questions about Captain Marvel or whatever,” Watts said. “But in the end, once we put it together, we said these are the core things that happened.”
What did you think of the broadcast recap? Let us know in the comments!
Spider-Man: Far From Home is now playing in theaters.
