Nobody is quite sure what the next Spider-Man movie has in store, even if we're now at least sure that said movie will still take place within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, based on the way that Spider-Man: Far From Home came to an end, it's sure to be a very different sort of Spider-Man movie. The major change in the status quo is likely to be a significantly risky move for Tom Holland's third Spider-Man movie, but he's probably not worried, since he already believes that Far From Home was already a pretty risky movie.
In the bonus features for the new Spider-Man: Far From Home Blu-ray, Tom Holland says that he thinks everybody involved in the film was "bold" due to the willingness to include such a difficult to interpret villain in the movie as Mysterio. According to Holland...
Mysterio is clearly a risk. If you even just look at him in the illustrations, it's not an easy character to bring to life and it's quite easy to see why, in the movies prior, no one took on the challenge of Mysterio. And I love the fact that Jon Watts and Marvel and Sony were bold enough to make that choice.
Mysterio is an incredibly popular Spider-Man villain, but it's pretty obvious why such a character would be difficult to bring to the screen. He's dressed in green spandex with a big purple cape and he's wearing a fishbowl on his head. Why would anybody in their right mind dress like that on purpose? The traditional backstory for Quentin Beck, a movie stuntman and special effects wizard gone bad, is also the sort of thing that probably read better in the comics in 1964 than it would work in a movie today.
However, with the current run of Spider-Man films clearly wanting to do something a little different than what came before, a lot of Spider-Man's other popular villains were sort of off limits. There were only so many other options. And how else do you separate yourself from he pack than by taking on a difficult villain and making it work.
And Spider-Man: Far From Home certainly did that. The biggest decision that likely helped Mysterio work was the casting of Jake Gyllenhaal in the role. Beyond that, the movie made some tweaks to the origin story, but did it in such a way that the key aspects of the character were still there. He was still all about playing with people's perceptions, making them believe they saw things they did not, and otherwise inventing reality.
This version of Quentin Beck is so good that we're forced to wonder if he's truly gone, or if he might have actually survived the events of Far From Home.
He's also the perfect character to be the one to turn Peter Parker's world upside down by revealing the identity of Spider-Man to the world. That revelation will inform the next Spider-Man movie, which we now know for sure is coming in July of 2021.
Having successfully made Mysterio work, who knows what the next film will try to accomplish. The bar has been raised, now we get to see if they can clear it.
