As expected, the brand new trailer for Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: No Way Home has delivered villain-palooza. There’s been suggestion for a while that the film would be ramping up to create a Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the Sinister Six, and the latest preview delivers our first extended looks at a number of classic antagonists – including Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Sandman, Electro, and The Lizard. But while the footage draws your attention to those characters, it seems that it may quietly feature another great foe that fans may miss unless they look at the material frame-by-frame. Specifically, it appears as though Jake Gyllenhaal’s Quentin Beck a.k.a. Mysterio may be making a return in the upcoming blockbuster.
Think I’m totally nuts? Well, here is a screenshot of the moment in question, which is featured around the 2:11 mark in the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer.
This quick bit caught my eye the first time I watched the footage, and it was the first thing I went back to when it ended. At first glance, it looks like it may just be another shot of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, flying on his glider through the night sky. When you start to look closer, however, you start to pick out certain details – the most significant being that this character isn’t wearing a mask; he’s only wearing a hood and a pair of goggles. This briefly got me thinking that it could possibly be either James Franco’s Green Goblin II from Spider-Man 3 or Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn Goblin from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but neither totally fit.
What got me to start leaning toward it possibly being Mysterio in Spider-Man: No Way Home is the armor on the leg. If you look closely, there is a shared design in the aesthetic with the costume that Jake Gyllenhaal wears in Spider-Man: Far From Home. Now, admittedly that suit turned out to be a part of the grand illusion that the character spun up to make himself look like a superhero to Peter Parker (in reality he was just wearing a grey motion capture suit with tracking dots), but if, perhaps, the character did go about creating a real suit, one would think that he would start with that look.
That’s admittedly a tad flimsy as far as evidence goes, but what has me much more convinced about my theory is what can be seen as the character flies by the camera. Because he is moving so fast, you can’t pick up many details even if you examine every frame, but one thing that very much stands out is the mystery player’s right hand, which is covered with a green, textured glove.
Again, I can’t help but notice that the glove doesn’t look vastly different to what Jake Gyllenhaal sports on his hands in Spider-Man: Far From Home:
The last big obstacle that would seemingly get in the way of this theory is the fate of Mysterio in the last Spider-Man movie, as he gets shot by one of his own drones at the end of the film and presumably dies. To that I will counter with this: didn’t we just learn that one of the key plot elements in Spider-Man: No Way Home is that all of the villains died during their previous confrontations with the web-slinger? If Quentin Beck has indeed returned from the dead, then that doesn’t really make him all that different than Doc Ock or Green Goblin in the context of the story.
Whether or not this actually is Mysterio in the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer, the good news is that we win. If it’s not the master of illusions, then it will be exciting to discover the character’s real identity when the movie hits theaters next month. And if it is actually him, then we can all just get excited to learn about the details of his return and his new motivations. It’s a win-win situation that just gets us more hyped for the arrival of the film.
Spider-Man: No Way Home, starring Tom Holland, Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Foxx, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei, Zendaya, and many more, will be arriving in theaters everywhere on December 17. To discover everything else that is headed our way from the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the next couple days, weeks, months, and years, be sure to check out both our Upcoming Marvel Movies and Upcoming Marvel TV guides.
