That whole kerfuffle between Disney and Sony over Spider-Man just about put “Spider-Man: Far From Home” in a weird spot. It’s the transitional movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe between “Avengers: Endgame” and the new era that’s about to begin next year, so it would have been weird if we all had to just forget this movie existed.
But fortunately they figured it out, and with that reconciliation we can all watch “Spider-Man: Far From Home” the way it was intended, as a bridge between the MCU’s past and the its still-largely-unknown future.
So to that end, “Spider-Man: Far From Home” does contain two extra scenes after the “end” of the movie, one that comes midway through the credits and another at the very end of the credits. And, yeah, we do get a bit of a glimpse of what’s next for the MCU, but it’s so cryptic that it’s tough to guess what it means just yet. But that doesn’t mean we won’t try.
The mid-credits scene starts as Peter Parker (Tom Holland) and MJ (Zendaya) are finishing up their swing around New York together, and end up in downtown Manhattan. The two are about to go their separate ways when a huge nearby screen lights up with a news break from the Daily Bugle, which looks like it’s transitioned into an InfoWars-style video site in the MCU. And then we see J Jonah Jameson, played by none other than JK Simmons, reprising his role from the Sam Raimi “Spider-Man” flicks.
Jameson, declaring as usual that Spidey is a menace who was the true cause of the whole Elementals thing, plays video from Mysterio’s last moments, manipulated to make it look like Spidey murdered Mysterio in cold blood. Then Jameson plays another video, shot seconds before the other one, in which Mysterio himself unmasks Spidey, revealing that it’s young Peter Parker behind the mask.
That’s crazy, but it doesn’t quite match the madness of the bonus scene at the end of the credits — which is the one that gives us a look ahead.
In the post-credit scene, we learn that Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) were not actually Nick Fury and Maria Hill in “Far From Home” — instead, they were the shapeshifter Talos (Ben Mendolsohn) and his wife, fellow Skrull shapeshifter Soren in disguise. After reverting to their normal green alien form, Talos makes a call to Fury to fill him in on how everything ended up going with Mysterio. Fury, it turns out, was actually out on a spaceship somewhere with a bunch of Skrulls, doing who-knows-what.
We don’t know what this scene means yet, but it’s probably safe to guess it, at minimum, has something to do with “Captain Marvel 2,” since the first movie is the one that introduced the Skrulls to the MCU.
If you wanna get real big in your thinking about this, you could reasonably speculate that maybe Talos has secretly been Fury for a bunch of other MCU movies, with the real Fury hanging out in space for decades. But that’s a tough idea to prove, given that if Fury had a secret space station with a bunch of alien buddies on it at his beck and call it would have come up sooner. Plus, we all saw him die in Thanos’ snap, and he didn’t revert to a Skrull before dusting out. More likely is that after Captain Marvel returned to Earth in “Avengers: Endgame” she brought some of her Skrull refugee friends with her.
It was heavily implied that Captain Marvel had not been back to Earth since 1995, so this arrangement with Fury is a recent one. But anything is possible, I guess. This scene has so little context to help parse the big picture from it. And that’s probably on purpose — I mean, they put this scene in a “Spider-Man” movie, which is a pretty surprising spot to jump back into the cosmic stuff.
We’re mostly focusing on what this has to do with “Captain Marvel 2” because that’s the natural connection. But we’re still several years away, at least, from that sequel. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that this scene will pay off much sooner in a different movie, because Marvel post-credits scenes almost always tease things coming in the next couple films on the calendar.
With “Black Widow” being, as far as we know, an earthbound prequel, that doesn’t seem like a real possibility. But next year’s “Eternals” is a prime candidate for a follow-up to this scene. While the Eternals are Earth-based, they can get pretty cosmic and they were created by the Celestials — Kurt Russell’s Ego from “Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2” was one of those — so we’re probably going to get some space stuff in that one. I’ll admit I have no idea how these things might connect, but the way the MCU interprets the comics stories for the big screen tends to defy my expectations anyway.
Whatever the case it, we’ll find out what’s going on with Nick Fury and the Skrulls eventually.