Spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Although Marvel Studios has become known partially for its credits scenes, those scenes are, by their very existence, rarely essential to the experience. If you want to get up and leave when the credits start to roll, you can. But in Spider-Man: Far From Home, we get some of the most important scenes yet in the MCU, one which could transform the future of the Spider-Man franchise and another that hints at the direction of the MCU’s next phase.
Seriously, stop reading if you don't want to have the credits scenes spoiled for you.
Spider-Man: Fugitive!
The scene that has major ramifications for where Spider-Man goes from here is the first post-credits scene. It seems like a harmless bit of fun where Spider-Man (Tom Holland) goes on a swing with MJ (Zendaya). But then they see the news that Mysterio sent out with doctored footage claiming that Spider-Man was responsible for the drone strikes in London. What’s more, he reveals that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. And this revelation comes with casting that had me cheering: TheDailyBugle.com with lead anchor, J. Jonah Jameson, played by J.K. Simmons.
Simmons previously played Jameson in the three Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and then there hasn’t been a Jameson in any of the Spider-Man movies since. His role in the comics was always to paint Spider-Man as a bad guy and use the power of the press to do so, putting Peter in an awkward position of working as a freelance photographer in service of a man determined to drag Spider-Man’s name through the mud. As always, the MCU makes some notable updates like making Jameson a presence on the Internet rather than print, and his look is slightly different (no flat top), but the reprisal of Simmons just goes to show that no comic book movie has ever been as dead-on with an actor as they were with the Oscar-winner.
As for what happens to Peter, fans will be furious if this doesn’t get resolved in the next Spider-Man movie. Marvel has upped the stakes in a far bigger way than they did last time with the “Aunt May Knows Peter Is Spider-Man” scene (which, granted, wasn’t post-credits). Peter not only didn’t get to control his revelation of being Spider-Man; he’s now being framed as a criminal. It’s a smart move because it upends Peter’s world (can he even go back to high school?) and probably puts him on the outs with the Avengers. Peter Parker is always playing at a disadvantage and this scene digs him into a deeper hole than he’s ever been in before.
Nick Fury in Space!
The other post-credits scene has a couple of major revelations of its own. First up, we learn that the Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that we’ve been watching for this whole movie are actually Skrulls. So for anyone who wants to complain that they were easily duped by Mysterio and his team (a fair judgment since Nick Fury could probably find out that Beck was previously employed by Tony Stark), you can lay off. They were just filling in because Nick Fury is out in space.
But what’s he doing in space? And why leave two Skrulls in his place? The answer seems to be in a quick line of dialogue where “Maria” and “Fury” discuss the presence of Kree sleeper cells on Earth. When we see the real Nick Fury in space, he’s surrounded by Skrulls and they seem to be preparing for something.
The implication is that we’re being set up for the Kree-Skrull War. In the comics, the Kree-Skrull War ran from June 1971 to March 1972 and was an interstellar war. In the movies, we’ve learned, thanks to Captain Marvel, that the Kree are the bad guys bent on perpetual war in order to expand their empire while the Skrulls, despite their shapeshifting abilities, are actually refugees who want to live in peace. Where that will take the MCU remains to be seen, but the post-credits scene is a reminder that we should be on the lookout for Skrulls.