Mysterio Nearly Had a Very Different Origin in Spider-Man: Far From Home (SPOILERS)

Warning: Spoilers abound for Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Mysterio had a great run in Spider-Man: Far From Home, but his story and origin almost took a very different direction. Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who co-wrote the film, told Collider that early discussions had them considering the possibility of making Mysterio a Skrull. Skrulls factored into the plot in a roundabout way, when it was revealed at the end of the film in a post-credits scene that Nick Fury and Maria Hill are actually Skrulls and the real Fury is in charge of a ship full of Skrulls in space.

“There were a lot of Skrull versions of the story early on,” McKenna said. “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.”

He added, “I don’t think it ever made it to paper, necessarily, but we talked about it for a while. We spent a lot of time in a windowless room with [director] Jon [Watts], and the folks from Marvel and Pascal Pictures, just talking it through. That’s what it is, in those early stages. It’s just a lot of talk. Going down different roads and just gradually refining things until you have a story.”