Far From Home is a twisty movie. No surprises there, given that it features Mysterio, a Spider-Man villain literally known for tricks, twists and illusory escapades. But according to its screenwriter, there was almost an extra twist the team threw into the movie’s narrative that could’ve been very interesting indeed.
If you’ve seen Far From Home, then you’re aware that — gasp — Quentin Beck really was a villain after all, adopting the Mysterio persona to hoodwink Peter Parker and the world into vindicating the tech he designed (and was ultimately appropriated by Tony Stark).
There was no multiverse, no elementals, no magical new superhero on the scene, it was all smoke, mirrors and a frankly alarming amount of gun-and-holo-projector-mounted drones.
But in a new interview with Collider, writer Chris McKenna revealed that there was almost another twist on all those twists: Beck was almost also a Skrull:
There were some early, early versions of this movie where Mysterio was a Skrull. There were a lot of Skrull versions of the story early on. When you’re doing a con artist movie, what we finally landed on — we sat down and talked about how do we keep on fooling the audience, how do we keep on having a lot of fun reveals?
How many distractions can we get away with before people want to murder us? [The Mysterio Skrull reveal] was an early idea about why he was doing everything he was doing.
At first glance, it makes some sense — why wouldn’t a shapeshifter cook up a con-artist persona that was about even more smoke and mirrors? But what makes it more interesting is that in Captain Marvel’s interpretation of the Skrulls in the MCU, they are undoubtedly heroic characters, rather than the villains they’ve primarily been portrayed as in the comics.
The Skrulls we met there were refugees, survivors forged into a sinister enemy by the Kree, even as the Kree persecuted them.
And when we go on to meet them again in Far From Home, with the reveal that the Fury and Hill both Peter and the audience have seen throughout the movie were actually Captain Marvel’s Talos and Soren, we get to see that the Skrulls that stayed behind to help Carol Danvers save the day now work to protect the Earth themselves, allied with Fury as part of a new cosmic organisation. These aren’t the secret invaders of the comics, but a new alien ally for the MCU’s earthbound heroes and beyond.
Taking all that in mind and then throwing in a Mysterio Skrull as a rogue element among that group of Talos’ refugees would’ve been a fascinating layer, one which opened up the idea that at least some of the Skrulls we meet going forward could be more aligned to the nefarious versions comics fans have known since their inception.
But in a movie that already had twists atop of twists, maybe it’s for the best that this particular one is a story they left for someone else to potentially tackle someway down the line. For now, the MCU Skrulls will stay as a force for good, rather than skulking about in the shadows as something more sinister.