Though Avengers: Endgame feels very much like the last entry in the current ‘phase’ of Marvel’s movies, there’s still one formal MCU entry to come this year… and this week has seen the release of the spoiler-filled trailer for Spider-man: Far from Home due out in July.
Set in the aftermath of Endgame, it shows – and here be those spoilers – Peter Parker trying to come to terms with the loss of his mentor and actually hoping to take a break from his friendly neighbourhood web-spinning duties. However Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has other plans for him and European events in Venice and London lead to Parker teaming up with Quentin Beck aka ‘Mysterio’ a master of illusion (Jake Gyllenhaal). Fans know the character as a villain in the comics continuity, so is there more to him that meets the eye? And could a ‘Chameleon’ also be at work?
One of the other interesting takeaways from the trailer and a subsequently released clip (shown on US show Ellen) is the apparent official dubbing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe‘s place in a multiverse of realities as ‘616’, at least according to Beck. That is the designation used in the comics, first coined by Alan Moore and Alan Davis in their Marvel UK Captain Britain series and informally used thereafter (even when the company restructured its idea of the multiverse and distanced themselves from the 616 designation, it still kept creeping back into various Marvel stories). Of course, there is an argument that if the comics version of the stories is 616, then the MCU should probably have been something different.
But given the various deals of recent years, the idea of a multiverse linking Marvel movies could be more than a throwaway line and could see the likes of the X-Men and Fantastic Four moving into the MCU at some point – a multiverse solution makes sense, allowing / accounting for different levels of interaction between the characters going forward…
