Why Spider-Man: Far From Home’s director wanted a Sixth Sense-like, post-credit twist

Everything in Spider-Man: Far From Home is a spoiler. A casual Marvel fan wouldn’t get that from the trailers — hey, Peter Parker’s vacationing in Europe when a bunch of Elementals start destroying buildings, what fun! — but it’s hard to talk about any aspect of the movie without giving away the tricks director Jon Watts has up his sleeves.

Speaking to Polygon from London, Watts sounds absolutely gleeful when describing how much he gets away with over the course of two hours. According to the director, there were three core ideas going into the development of the movie: (1) Send Peter on a eurotrip (2) deal with Endgame and Tony Stark’s death and (3) get Mysterio in there because Mysterio rules. “The trick was just figuring out how to get them all to fit together cohesively,” Watts says. Everything was just gravy — and there’s a lot of gravy in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

[Ed. note: This post contains major spoilers for Far From Home.]

While the aftermath of Far From Home’s final battle positions Peter as a true successor to Tony Stark, the movie’s post-credit scenes are the most consequential in all of the MCU. The mid-credit sequence pairs the implosion of Peter’s life with a get-on-your-feet-and-howl cameo. The final end-credit moment plays more like a gag, while challenging everything we thought we knew. Many reviews for the movie call the scene out for being too seismic for such a late game play.

For Watts, the choice of revealing Nick Fury and Maria Hill as the incognito Skrull couple Talos and Soren, and having Fury be lightyears away at the displaced extraterrestrials’ headquarters, clicked right into the logic, character quirks, and thrills he’s chasing in Far From Home.

“It just felt right in this con man movie to have that one last reveal that makes you look at everything that you’ve seen completely differently,” Watts said. “lt felt organic and true to the structure of the film.”

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Beyond the genre riff, the reveal helped make the logic of Far From Home compute in a galaxy full of Avengers-level heroes. Maybe Nick Fury wouldn’t be so easily fooled by Mysterio. But Talos-as-Fury? We see him juggling the rise in Kree sleeper cells, so clearly he has a lot on his plate.

“Nick Fury’s super power is essentially being skeptical,” Watts notes. “Suspicion is what makes Nick Fury, Nick Fury. That just helped make that part of the story make sense to me in a good way. Nick Fury was sort of taking a vacation of his own, which fits into the greater storyline of Peter’s vacation. So it all sort of came together in this one last moment.”

Watts says he hopes there’s Sixth Sense-like rewatch value to Far From Home. He knows he’s left doors open and internet theorists will pop off in every direction (we see you, Guy Who Thinks Tony Stark May Have Been a Skrull in Endgame, but we do not believe you). But the text that’s there, and the nuances of the performances, should take on a whole new life in their own right.

“Now that you know Mysterio’s illusions are creating the Elementals and that that’s not Fury, and that’s not Maria, it becomes a completely different movie,” he says. “I can’t wait to see what people discover.”