Spider-Man: Far From Home Almost Featured a Very Different Mysterio

Spider-Man: Far From Home is currently dominating the box office and charming audiences everywhere, with its unique take on quite a lot of Marvel Comics lore. As some of Far From Home‘s crew recently revealed, the way that the film introduced Quentin Beck/Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) almost took a completely different shape.

Spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home below!

In a new interview with The New York Times, co-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers spoke about Mysterio — including the twist that surrounded his true intentions. While Beck starts out the film as an ally of sorts to Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland), he is later revealed to be a disgruntled ex-employee of Stark Industries, who uses a slew of technologically-advanced illusions to pretend to be one of Earth’s biggest new heroes. As McKenna and Sommers revealed, an earlier version of Mysterio’s arc initially included a more straightforward take on his villainy.

“One of the hardest things with these movies is landing on the villain.” McKenna explained. “With Mysterio, there were versions of the story where he was at the forefront as an out-and-out villain that Peter and Nick were chasing around Europe as he pulled off these events, all building to this back story of why he was doing it, which was a wholly different third act. We went down a lot of different roads.”

“But ultimately, because Mysterio deals so much in deception, it was sort of natural that it led to a story structure where his entire identity was a mislead for a while,” Sommers added.

“There’s going to be people familiar enough with the comics who are going to see right through him, but you kind of can’t worry about that when you’re coming up with a plot like this.” McKenna added. “You just have to hope that you can get away with it long enough so that when the reveal comes up, people are still having fun with the movie.”

Considering the response to Mysterio thus far – with many calling him one of the MCU’s best villains yet – it’s safe to say that the risk paid off.

“As soon as that con goes down, it’s a romance, that’s a bromance,” McKenna previously told ComicBook.com. “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.”

What do you think of the Mysterio twist in Spider-Man: Far From Home? Would you rather have seen him as a more straightforward villain? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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