Much like the last phase of the MCU which ended with the smaller-scale Ant-Man after the spectacle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Spider-Man: Far From Home finishes out Phase 3. With that in mind, and with the huge events of Endgame still ringing in our ears, everyone wants to know - what’s next for the MCU?
The film is pretty self-contained and focuses on Peter Parker’s growth and his acceptance of Tony Stark’s death. With that, there’s no real cross over or appearance from other MCU characters but even so, Spider-Man’s latest outing does give us plenty to mull over on what’s the come. So we’ve rounded up ten things that Far From Home answers about phase 4 of the MCU.
And it goes without saying that this list is incredibly spoiler-heavy.
How does the world cope with the loss of Tony Stark?
Throughout Spider-Man: Far From Home there are shrines and tributes to Tony Stark and Iron Man which can be seen all over the world as Peter’s class trip takes them to several European countries. Clearly the world is in a state of morning,
A lot of the trailers focussed on how Peter specifically would cope with Tony’s death. And while it’s consequential, it’s not the driving force for the story. It’s addressed a few times and Peter finds great comfort in Happy who’s also missing his former boss before getting some pretty substantial closure in his own character development.
Can the stakes shrink again after Endgame?
The trouble with the MCU reaching this huge crescendo in Endgame was how you move on and whether the new movies can figuratively and literally come down to earth. In Far From Home, we see a much smaller-scale movie with much, much lower stakes.
But what does the MCU does best is tell stories and that’s no different here. Sure, Far From Home is a smaller movie, but it still packs a great storytelling punch showing that we don’t need to see all MCU films scale up to the size of Endgame to get a great movie.
Will the Skrulls play a part?
It was thought - ahead of Captain Marvel - that the Skrulls were going to play the part of the next big bads in the fourth and fifth phases of the MCU as they historically have done in the comics. But that was quickly dispelled as they were shown to be the victims of the movie and finding them a new home was one of the reasons Carol Danvers was unavailable in the chronological time-gap between her movie and Iron Man.
And even though they’re not the baddies of the MCU going forward, Spider-Man’s final end credits sequence does show that they’re in play and that their shapeshifting abilities might be really useful when it’s revealed that Nick Fury and Maria Hill were in fact Talos and Soren all the way through the movie.
Can Spider-Man keep his identity a secret?
A huge part of Tony Stark’s persona was Iron Man; so much so that he never bothered to try and keep that a secret. In fact, the MCU, in general, doesn’t put a lot of stock into characters keeping their superhero alias’ a secret from the world. It’s only really been Peter Parker who tried to make sure no one knew his web-slinging alter ego.
But that changes in the first of Far From Home’s two post-credits stings in which J. Jonah Jameson reveals Peter to be Spider-Man. This is going to be an interesting development for the MCU as it’s not a storyline we’ve seen for any of the iterations of the character.
Is Phase 4 going intergalactic?
While the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home take place (almost) entirely on earth and the idea of a multiverse is tabled at least for now, there is set up for Phase 4 that shows the scope of the movies can spread further than just this planet.
In the second post-credits scene we see Nick Fury on a spaceship with lots of Skrulls around him. And as we know from Captain Marvel that they’re not on earth. So knowing what we know about this and the upcoming Eternals movie, Phase 4 is definitely going to involve some intergalactic set pieces.
Will we see The Sinister Six (with Mysterio)?
With the announcement that Mysterio would feature in Spider-Man: Far From Home, there was online chatter form comic book fans that Phase 4 would feature something that built towards The Sinister Six, a group of supervillains who take on Spider-Man.
There have been hints that an MCU iteration might also feature Scorpion and The Vulture, both of which were still in play after Homecoming, but Far From Home answers for sure that Mysterio wouldn’t be a part of this group thanks to his sticky end in the movie.
Who’s in charge?
Nick Fury was dusted in Infinity War and appears only very briefly in Endgame. But even before that, he was beginning to play a smaller part. So there was a question about who, going into Phase 4, would be the person move the MCU’s characters around like chess pieces.
But in this movie we see Fury take a sizable role and at the end tell everyone that it’s time to get back to work, implying that he’s going to be instrumental in pushing the MCU forward just as he has done from the very beginning.
How did the so-called blip affect characters’ ages?
Now known as The Blip in the MCU, Thanos’ snap that saw half of the population go missing for half a decade. The difference in age isn’t as big a thing when you look at characters like Ant-Man compared to Sam Wilson. But for high-school kids, five years is a big difference.
The beginning of Far From Home goes some way to explaining what students had to go through when they turned up again with people effectively in the same class even though they’re now technically five years older. But it still remains to be seen whether this will hold up in future MCU movies or they’ll need to be some time-drive course correction.
Where does Happy Hogan fit in?
Not only was Jon Favreau the MCU’s first director, his character Happy Hogan is a fan favorite and was an ever-loyal employee of Tony Stark and Stark Industries’. But with the loss of Iron Man, there was question around what Happy’s role would be in Phase 4 and onward.
He’s cropped up in lots of Iron Man-associated movies and it now looks like the same is going to be the case with Spider-Man / Peter Parker who now has Stark-level artificial intelligence to help him out on his superhero journey.
What part does Spider-Man play?
There’s a few questions throughout the movie that ask whether Spider-Man is an Avenger - to which he says he doesn’t know - and whether he’s going to take over the Iron Mantle. The first isn’t explicitly answered but thanks to the character development seen in Peter throughout the movie, we now know that he is going to operate at least as some form of replacement for Iron Man.
Peter now has EDITH at his disposal as well as a nifty pair of glasses left to him by Tony and there’s a great shot ahead of the final battle that shows him in full Stark-mode as AC/DC plays on the airplane’s sound system. Even if he does mistake them for Led Zeppelin.
