At one point, the MCU’s timeline was fairly confusing, and the questions became so frequent the Marvel team decided to publish an official timeline, that kind of only served to clear up some points and confuse others. Time-hopping in movies can also lead to other sorts of errors and sometimes it’s even the cast themselves who catches them!
Even Tom Holland knows some of the continuity stuff within the MCU can be a bit confusing, and in a recent interview he shared one error that really jumped out at him upon his own review of Spider-Man: Far From Home: the cell phones.
I love that we jump five years in the future but the phones we have in the film are the same. Like, they didn’t upgrade their phones in five years? [You’d think] they’d be hologram phones at that point.
Given what Spider-Man: Far From Home deems “The Blip” and five years passing for some but not others, you’d expect there to be some weirdness, and there is. Some of the students at Peter Parker’s school have aged five years, but assumedly not been in school during that time given the current societal infrastructure.
However, to Tom Holland, one striking thing is that it’s supposedly been five years since the events in Avengers: Infinity War, but everyone still seems to have the same phones they had when they “blipped” (or didn’t).
In the interview with Fandango, Zendaya defends the decision from the creative team, and not simply because creating futuristic phones would likely have been budget prohibitive. She brings up the point that the infrastructure wasn’t in a great place when everyone returned as defense for the use of “old” phones, noting,
But I think they’ve been doing so much clean-up and like dealing with the aftermath of it.
Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon also discuss how convenient the phones in Spider-Man: Far From Home are, given it looks as if Apple went out of business and Sony has control of the cell phone business in the future, which is also a funny point.
In any case, the phone thing isn’t hugely noticeable in Spider-Man: Far From Home. It pales in comparison to other changes, which include the fact the garbage and other community amenities seem to be back on track -- even in urban areas -- after the events in Avengers: Endgame and that some characters are simply just older while others returned after The Snap at the age they disappeared.
At one point during Avengers: Endgame we even heard about whales returning to a harbor, which was a bright spot of news in an otherwise bleak reality. Given that happened, think of all of the other organizational chaos involved with Thanos' meddling in the universe? Who knows how many cell phones were manufactured during that time anyway?
You can see the web slinger and his pals back on the big screen and answering some post-blip questions right now.
