Warning, there are spoilers ahead.
Anyone who is familiar with Mysterio’s comic book backstory wasn’t really buying his whole Spider-Man: Far From Home, “I’m a hero from another dimension,” story. As in the comics, Mysterio is a huckster fraud, but also surprisingly good at fighting Spider-Man. And Jon Watts knew that if you’re a Spider-Man fan, you probably weren’t buying it either.
“Well, yeah, it’s not like I’m shooting for the Vulture’s reveal level of a twist,” says Watts. “If you know the comics, you know that something is going to be up with Mysterio. At least it was something that you’d been waiting on for and kind of satisfying. We were keeping it a secret, but personally, I feel like half of the audience might actually genuinely be fooled. Anyone that’s a Spider-Man fan is going to see that something is coming, but maybe not exactly how we’re going to do it.”
Using Mysterio, this opened up a whole world of illusions and crazy visuals, meant to mess with Spider-Man. And this leads to a pretty intense scene. Peter Parker is still dealing with the loss of Tony Stark and Mysterio uses this to his evil advantage. First, he tricks Peter into trusting him, then, later, conjures up imagery that Watts compares to a particular moment in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.
“That sequence, there were a lot of crazy ideas that were thrown around because once you get into the world of Mysterio you can kind of do anything you want,” says Watts. “But yeah, Zombie Ironman. It’s very scary.”
In one of Mysterio’s illusions, Peter sees Tony Stark’s grave, and out crawls a battered up Iron Man suit as we get a closeup of a pretty gnarly looking skull seeping out. It’s pretty gruesome.
“I’m a little bit worried that,” admits Watts. That might be too scary for some kids, but that could be their generation’s Large Marge.”
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