As a heads-up, you’ll probably want to have seen Avengers: Endgame before checking out the latest Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer. It opens with a fairly big spoiler. It also possibly sets up the next big event movie following the double bill of Infinity War and Endgame with the big possible Secret Wars twist revealed in the trailer.
This is a bid deal: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is actually from another Earth. “Beck is from Earth, just not ours,” Nick Fury tells Peter Parker. “The Snap tore a hole in our dimension.” We’re entering the Marvel multiverse now, which is pretty exciting for a lot of reasons. It gives Marvel a great way to introduce the X-Men and explain why they’ve been missing all this time. It ties into Marvel’s upcoming What If? TV series, which will explore animated alternate realities. And it opens the door not only for more heroes to make their appearances—Miles Morales and Peter Parker do team up in a comic after Miles’s reality is imperiled—but for the Secret Wars arc.
What is the Secret Wars arc? We’re going to focus more on the 2015 re-do of the series, which centers on the multiverses collapsing due to the machinations of evil, cosmic beings called Beyonders. Between the Beyonders’ machinations and the evil tomfoolery of one Victor Von Doom, the entire Marvel Universe is destroyed except for one reality. Things get better, of course, but for a while there’s a lot of mayhem and universes colliding.
This is an excellent path for Marvel to potentially go down for the next Phase or two. Building to yet another ultimate Big Bad with universe-destroying goals would just be a re-tread of Thanos. The collapse of the multiverse because the Snap ripped a hole in space-time that the heroes have to fix? Excellent. It’s fairly fresh and exciting, rather than just repeating the same general arcs until the MCU comes to a close.
Alternate realities were somewhat teased before this, when the Russo brothers implied that Steve, in his time travel shenanigans, opened up an alternate reality where he spent his life with Peggy Carter. Could we see Steve in his prime again during Secret Wars? Similarly, both Tony and Natasha could make returns somehow through an alternate reality. Don’t expect any of them to become leads again, but it would be nice to see our familiar faces.
Secret Wars would also give the new characters their own battle to face that is still tied into the legacy of those who came before. The new Avengers will have to reckon with the damage done by the Snap and fix the world and make it better. As Steve says in the beginning of Endgame, “the world is in our hands now.” The Marvel world is in the hands of Peter, T’Challa, Carol, Sam, and others now. It’s their job to make it better, even if better means fighting their way through a multiverse collapse.
We won’t have any solid news on the actual Phase Four lineup until either SDCC or D23, so it’s all speculation until then. Still, the tease in the trailer promises something excellent coming that gives Far From Home a reason to be the final film in Phase Three. Will Secret Wars come to the big screen in a few years? We’ll have to wait and see.
(image: Marvel Studios)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
