SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME
WATCH OUT, WORLD! THE WALL, CRAWLER'S, GOING GLOBAL IN SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME
The web-slinger’s back – and this time he’s crawling all over Europe. How very topical of him.
Jon Watts KNOWS his place in the universe: “it’s like, you’ve got to follow Endgame, and hit the landing on phase three!” it’s not an enviable position for any director on the Marvel payroll.
Avengers: Endgame isn’t just the highest-grossing superhero movie ever made, but the second highest-grossing film in cinema history, toppling
Titanic with a casual snap of the infinity Gauntlet. Spider-Man: Far From Home – Watts’ second swing with the web-slinger after 2017’s
Homecoming – arrives in its huge, reality-shattering shadow. “i knew everything that happened in Infinity War and Endgame, and i got to see the movies earlier than most,” he tells SFX, taking time out from a final polish of the spider-sequel. “knowing that, it sort of set the table for the kind of story that we would have to tell, and the world in which we would have to follow.”
Homecoming embedded peter parker in the Mcu with a wellreceived mix of superheroics and breezy teen comedy. “on the first one, i felt like we had an opportunity – and a responsibility – to remind people why they like spider-Man so much, and to keep it intentionally small, and to keep it really grounded, and to situate it firmly in the Marvel universe. now that we’ve done that, i felt we could really run with it, and show what spider-Man can do.
“he’s growing up. one of the exciting things about these movies is the idea that we’re able to track that development. he’s growing into a hero on a global scale.”
SPIDEY’S GRAND TOUR
Global’s the keyword. While Far From Home steps back from the epic cosmic stakes of Endgame – think of this as a sorbet to finish phase three – it’s bigger in scope than Homecoming. as the title declares, our friendly neighbourhood spider-Man is no longer in the neighbourhood. he’s hurled out of his concrete-and-glass new York comfort zone and into europe, on an adventure that scuttles across the atlas. venice. the alps. prague. Berlin. holland. london. it’s a passport-battering ride for hero and filmmakers alike.
“We’ve never seen spider-Man on the big screen outside of the united states,” says producer eric carroll. “We’ve certainly never seen him in a place as iconic as venice. of course, because it’s peter parker, not tony stark, flying around the world, he’s going to do it in classic peter parker style. We want to have fun with these guys, a lot of whom have never been out of new York city, and they’re in europe for the first time.”
the pretext for the continent-hopping tale is a summer vacation trip, shared by peter (tom holland) and returning Midtown classmates MJ (Zendaya), ned (Jacob Batalon) and Flash (tony revolori).
“We try to give everyone something fun to do, and to give everyone a new adventure,” says Watts. “on the last movie, we were trying a lot of things out, and introducing a lot of cool characters, and trying out new takes on
characters that you’ve seen before in other movies, and hoping we didn’t completely screw it up. now we can do more with that.”
While Homecoming riffed on the hairspray-and-heartache ’80s teen flicks of John hughes, Watts admits Far From Home has less in the way of celluloid inspirations.
“there’s not as many european road trip high school movies as i thought there were,” he laughs. “i went back to try and find them. they’re just something that exist only in my mind. they’re not really out there.”
Maybe it’s more of a euro-spy thriller, anyhow. also far from home is nick Fury (samuel l Jackson) and the forces of shield. “peter gets wrapped up in this whole crazy european adventure that nick Fury is recruiting for,” says carroll. “We also have cobie smulders reprising her role as Maria hill. they’re running the operation, trying to save europe from some pretty fantastic creatures.
“Just getting these guys in a room together has been so much fun. Because you get nick Fury, Maria hill, 13 of these badass mercenaries, and then you’ve got high-schooler peter parker raising his hand in the corner, answering questions and questioning people’s math and science.”
COSTUME CHANGE
Shield soon outfits spidey with a natty new look. as carroll tells us, black is the new red and blue. “once he’s out in europe, he says to nick Fury, ‘i can’t just show up in my spider-Man suit, like i did in Washington. two class trips in a row – spider-Man shows up to save the day? the gig is up, man.’ nick Fury is like, ‘alright, alright. i’ll get you a new costume.’ so nick provides him with this… we’re calling it his stealth suit. it’s obviously very much in the world of what you see with Black Widow and the other shielD characters in the first movies they’ve been in. it’s a totally practical costume.”
peter finds himself teamed with another recently recruited shielD operative – one who’ll be very familiar to comic book diehards. Making his live-action bow is illusion-master Quentin Beck aka Mysterio, one of the most iconic lee and Ditko creations.
“i always wanted to bring Mysterio to spider-Man, but i wanted to bring him into the world in a different way,” says Watts.
this Mysterio claims to be from earth-833. Wait, what? Yes, that’s the Mcu’s first acknowledgement of the multiverse, a longtime story engine in the comics. as Fury tells it, “the snap tore a hole in our dimension.”
“he has this great, mysterious backstory you’ll hear about over the course of the movie,”
Mysterio has this great, mysterious backstory that you’ll hear about over the course of the movie
says carroll. “there’s all the fun dynamics of spider-Man feeling like a little high school guy next to this awesome Mysterio character.”
playing Mysterio is Jake Gyllenhaal, finally drafted into the Mcu after years of courtship. reportedly he was in the frame for Doctor strange, which makes his casting as a caped illusionist neatly ironic – could it be magic? or simply so much smoke and mirrors?
“Jake is just a powerhouse, and we’re so lucky to have him,” carroll tells SFX. “Marvel had talked to Jake a couple of times, just about various things. this one really felt like a good fit. We were looking for somebody who would be at home next to all of the other heroes we’ve introduced in this universe. and he just seems like the kind of guy with the right amount of gravitas. if you know Mysterio’s origin from the comics, he’s got this great duality to him. and we think that’s something that Jake is probably uniquely qualified to tackle.”
While the movie Mysterio honours his comic book visuals – yes, that legendary fishbowl helmet is present and correct – this version of the classic supervillain claims to be on the side of the angels… or at least the clandestine righteousness of shielD.
“he’s a good guy in this movie,” stresses carroll. “But we’ve done that with other characters, too. chiwetel [ejiofor]’s Mordo – isn’t it more fun, maybe, to get to know these people for a while before they turn, or something like that? so in this movie, he’s absolutely a hero.”
More faithful to their nefarious origins are the elementals, the movie’s major threat to life and property across europe. it’s these city-imperilling creatures that shielD are battling – and they’re inspired by comic book bad guys who never quite reached the a-list antagonist cool of Mysterio.
“there’s so many great villains in the spider-Man world,” says Watts. “i wanted to do something with the sort of middle-level villain you would always see on the saturday morning cartoons that you would never really see in the movies.”
“hydro-Man is one of those characters you never thought you’d see on the big screen,” agrees carroll. and it’s Far From Home’s take on this second-division villain who’s responsible for one of the film’s showcase sequences, unleashing his mastery of water upon the canals of venice.
“once we started talking about coming to europe and we had this idea for these elemental creatures attacking, it was hydroMan that inspired us to go to venice. We had put a thing on the wall, like iconic european locations. ‘Where can we go that a) is iconic but
Spider-Man is the best hero out there. It’s exciting to see him take his rightful place at the top of the pyramid
b) doesn’t feel like every movie goes there over and over?’ venice was one of the first ones that came up. obviously there have been some iconic movie moments in venice, but we thought as far as a superhero sequence or something, there’s never been anything like that in that location. and that was a fun thing to explore. once we had the idea, and we really wanted to use hydro-Man, we were like ‘there’s nowhere better than that.’”
two of the other elementals remain under wraps but carroll confirms the identity of the fourth.
“not only will we get to see hydro-Man, we’re also going to introduce the Mcu take on Molten Man, which is another famous B-level spider-Man villain that we thought would be fun to take our crack at making cool.
“his distinguishing thing in the comics is that he’s made of this molten, gold-ish colour metal, but he’s also fiery hot all the time. so that creates a lot of things for spider-Man to try and figure out when they’re fighting. there’s some great, classic panels of him having to web his fist so he can hit him without getting burned and stuff like that. again, this is just another character we wanted to take a crack at bringing to the big screen, but of course we want to do it in a way that feels more cinematic.”
For all the many spectacular, eyeball-stealing new characters that are introduced, it’s spider-Man who remains the heart of the movie for Watts. For him, the wall-crawler is the boy king of the Mcu, too.
“he’s the best,” declares the director, simply. “he’s the best hero out there. it’s exciting for me now, in Far From Home, to see spider-Man step up and take his rightful place at the top of the pyramid.”
step up? Web-sling his way, surely…
Spider-Man: Far From Home is out 2 July