Spider-Man: Far From Home Fan Discovers Clever Way How Mysterio Manipulated Peter Parker

Spider-Man: Far From Home is full of twists and turns, and a lot of these come from Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Mysterio. The director and crew packed the movie with subtle hints that Quentin Beck isn’t what he claims to be. Now, they’re ready to talk about one big moment that showcases how deep the con really goes with Mysterio after fans keyed in on it. The scene where Peter Parker hands over the glasses to Beck is a moment that has dramatic repercussions for the rest of the film. Spider-Man thinks he’s making his own decisions, but he’s been carefully guided to this outcome by the villain. There’s one subtle detail in the staging of that bar scene that fans might not have picked up on though. The entire sequence hinges on the wall behind beck and Peter’s line of sight. Jon Watts explained the nuances to Insider.

“You may not have caught this, but all the things on the wall behind Quentin [in the bar scene] are things that feed into the idea that Peter would hand the glasses over to him,” Watts said in the conversation. “So even the art direction is part of the con. There’s military medals, that sort of helps remind Peter what Quentin said about being a hero soldier. There’s a picture of glasses, again, embedding that idea. So there are all these things in the background of the bar in Peter’s eye line that will subconsciously motivate him to hand these glasses over.”

That is pretty impressive, but there are tons of moments where Mysterio works that magic on Peter Parker and the hero is none the wiser. Even the climactic final battle hints towards one large trick as no one really knows if Mysterio lives or dies by the end of the film. The writers of the film delighted in leaving these breadcrumbs, but went through a lot of version of this story before settling on the version that made it to theaters. They talked about that process with the New York Times.

“With Mysterio, there were versions of the story where he was at the forefront as an out-and-out villain that Peter and Nick [Fury] 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,” co-writer Chris McKenna said in that interview.

“But ultimately,” co-writer Erik Sommers chimed in, “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.”

Spider-Man: Far From Home is available on home video now.