Spider-Man: Far From Home Writers Explain Mysterio Choice, Break Down Major Twist

Spider-Man: Far From Home ended up being a roller coaster ride crafted by the pens of Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. More than once, what Peter Parker thought he was seeing and the audience believed to be real turned out to be illusions and lies crafted by a villain appearing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time. McKenna and Sommers took pride in sending audiences on a ride similar to that of Spider-Man in their latest entry to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having already lent their writing skills to Ant-Man and The Wasp. Speaking to ComicBook.com, the duo opened up about the villain efforts with the second standalone Spider-Man movie in the MCU.

Spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home follow. Major spoilers!

Despite acting as an ally and a hero, Mysterio was nothing more than a liar and villain. He wanted to right what he believed were wrongs in how he was treated by Tony Stark and become an Avengers-like hero. While the film, at one point, took other villains into consideration, it was Mysterio who consistently stole the show behind-the-scenes.

“There were definitely a couple of the other iconic character danced around, and wondering if could be combined, two at the same time, but it all kept coming back to Mysterio,” McKenna explained. “And Mysterio was the serious one, because okay, how do you do the stuntman-turned-magician with springs on his feet…” Sommers noted, the character also wears a fishbowl on his head, which made grounding him a bit difficult. “So it was scary, but we then finally committed and we went out on a lot of different roads with him, then ultimately kept coming back to making him like the Mysterio from the comic book in terms of being a con artist and trying to, even at the end, trying to make Peter, Spider-Man, the villain of the story,” McKenna said. “So we leaned into that, and tried to ground it as well as we could and use the MCU’s past so that the illusion didn’t require him to build a giant amusement park in an abandoned lot.”

Landing on Mysterio might have been the easy part for the writers. “Once we hit on the idea that we were doing a con, then we had to come up with, ‘Well, what is he trying to con Peter out of?’” McKenna explained. “And that’s when we developed the idea of the EDITH system that were inhabited in these glasses. The glasses were actually the great idea of [director Jon Watts] that they would be inhabited in that sort of dark glasses, like the symbol of the crown. Also these glasses that sort of don’t fit him, but we knew that as a con artist, it would have to come down to that moment where’s actually able to cease the crown, and take these glasses from Peter, but in a way that Peter would hand them over, the classic con.”

Then comes the sequence where everything is revealed as Quentin Beck celebrates his con with his team. “As soon as that con goes down, it’s a romance, that’s a bromance,” McKenna explained. “He’s seducing Peter and we knew that the movie was going to pivot on that scene. The way we were writing, we came up with the idea of a bar scene, that we always liked, him taking him out after the Molten Man battle, and then everything came out, everything became revealed, it naturally grew out of all of the elements that we had built up to until that moment.”

Also, the reveal of Mysterio’s true motivation came down to crafting a three-act film. “I would say just in terms of, structurally too,” Sommers points out. “Once the veil drops, and you realize things aren’t as they seem, we had to, as quickly as possible, get the audience caught up on, ‘Okay, well then who is this guy really, and what does he want really?’ And, everything with the bar scene just seemed like an economical and fun way to do that.”

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Spider-Man: Far From Home is now playing in theaters.