Spoilers for Spider-Man: Far from Home and Avengers: Endgame follow below.

Following in the footsteps of a movie as massively popular as Avengers: Endgame is a tough enough task on its own, but Spider-Man: Far from Home also had the unenviable challenge of telling another Peter Parker story directly after said teenager—and the entire MCU world, frankly—has just suffered an incredible personal loss. Those were the chips handed to Far from Home screenwriters Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna when they started writing the Spider-Man sequel, which marks their third MCU film after co-writing Spider-Man: Homecoming and Ant-Man and the Wasp.

With Far from Home, Sommers and McKenna were able to craft a Spider-Man story from the ground up—albeit with the knowledge that their film would be opening in theaters mere months after the Infinity War sequel Avengers: Endgame. So the two set about creating a fun, engaging, and compelling Spider-Man story that also acknowledges a post-Thanos world and also deals directly with the loss of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), mentor to Far from Home protagonist Peter Parker (Tom Holland). The result? A genuinely fun, consistently surprising, and heartfelt follow-up that serves as both a palate cleanser and something of an epilogue to Avengers: Endgame. A peek at a post-Tony Stark world, if you will.

I recently had the chance to speak with Spider-Man: Far from Home screenwriters Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna about their work on the movie, and since Far from Home has been in theaters for a couple weeks now, I decided to go into full spoiler territory. The two discussed how they set about choosing Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) as the villain, how they then went about crafting a con artist story that kept the audience engaged without spoiling Mysterio’s secret, the film's structural challenges, and the “eureka!” moment from director Jon Watts that led to MJ (Zendaya) revealing she knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man at the precise moment he’s trying to confess his feelings. The two also talked about that Skrulls twist, and how an early iteration of Far from Home featured Mysterio as a Skrull.

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Image via Sony Pictures

Check out the full interview below. Spider-Man: Far from Home is in theaters everywhere now.

I'm curious what the conversation was like when you guys were first hired to write this script. Were there kind of tentpoles that you had to hit, or did you really just kind of have carte blanche to take the story wherever you wanted?

ERIK SOMMERS: Typically, when we start on a Marvel movie—and we've done three now—they'll have a document that they have put together with ideas for the movie based on source material, their own internal conversations, things from the overall MCU that might be pulled in, things that need to be addressed based on other movies. That's always a really useful starting point, and we'll all look at that document and that'll be sort of a source for conversations. And then we'll take it from there, but things can change a lot. It's just a set of ideas to sort of get the whole conversation started.

When you guys were hired, did you know that you were coming out right after Endgame? Was this kind of always set up to be the next Marvel story being told after that big Avengers movie?

SOMMERS: Yes it was. It seemed to make perfect sense too because, obviously, over several movies, the relationship between Peter and Tony has been built. And now with what's happened in Endgame, it seems very natural that the next Spider-Man movie would be dealing with that.

So were you guys brought in on what was going to happen in Endgame when you were first hired, or did you kind of get to work on a Spider-Man sequel, and then at some point someone knocked on the door and said, “Hey, guess what?”.

CHRIS MCKENNA: We knew. It's all laid out. Marvel, they have a plan. So, they knew it was going to be coming out a couple of months after Endgame and it was already plotted, obviously. So, we knew that we were going to have to deal with everything that happened in Endgame, as the first Marvel MCU movie following Endgame.

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Image via Sony Pictures

Obviously Tony's death is kind of the big holdover from Endgame that really kind of looms large over this movie, but I was curious if there were any other plot threads from Endgame that you guys had considered maybe earlier versions of the script that didn't make it in?

MCKENNA: We had to deal with the Blip, and we had to deal with Tony. Those were the two big plot points that we were handed. Knowing that we had to deal with this time transition, which I think everyone had kind of questions about, and we ran towards it in a fun way. Like what’s the nitty-gritty of half the world disappearing and half the world staying? It all worked pretty well, particularly in high school because high school is embarrassing and humiliating and weird enough without having half your class disappearing and then coming back, and you've moved on to college, and half your friends are still now in high school. Or in, specifically from the movie, an eleven-year-old elementary school student is now the class hunk.

That was funny. But I think one of the things that really kind of caught fans off-guard, a little bit, was that Mysterio was in this film, but he was not positioned as the villain in the marketing. I was curious if you guys can talk a little bit about kind of why you selected Mysterio for the film, and then how you went about handling him, and positioning him as kind of a “good guy”, until that turn.

SOMMERS: Mysterio is just an iconic villain, and we discussed various villains, but we kept coming back to Mysterio. He really seemed like the next logical choice, but the challenge was how to update the Mysterio from the source material, the comics, into someone that we would see in the MCU. So, it just came down to a lot of conversations with the creative team about how we would update Mysterio, how we would make someone who in the comics is a stuntman, special effects guy with strings on his shoes, into someone that we would see coming up against Spider-Man in an MCU movie.

MCKENNA: It just seemed like, particularly with, yeah, iconic, top tier Spider-Man villain that really hadn't been done yet, and then thematically it seemed like coming off of some of the chaos of the world, it really seemed to work with a character who thrives off of chaos, and being able to deceive people in that chaos.

SOMMERS: The world is sort of traumatized by what happened, and confused, and vulnerable to someone like Mysterio. So is Peter. He is traumatized, confused and vulnerable by what happened to him personally. So, Mysterio is the perfect villain to take advantage of that, to get what he wants.

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Image via Sony Pictures

That’s one of my favorite aspects of the film, is that his plan and his plot ties thematically into this idea of, for lack of a better term, fake news. Selling the lie, because that’s what people want. Was that kind of exciting for you guys to really kind of dig thematically into Mysterio, in addition to, obviously, kind of the visual aspects of him? Really kind of hitting upon something that speaks to the world we live in today.

SOMMERS: Obviously we live in a world of fractured reality. Everyone is living in their own bubble of what they see as the truth. We follow social media that just confirms our own biases. We can't even agree on what's fact and what's fiction. Yeah, so all that plays into this character who's able to manipulate reality, and get everyone to believe something and even though it's so clearly, by the end, a lie that he's been telling, half the world still believes it.

For the first act of the movie, Mysterio is set up as the good guy. Was there ever a version where he was an ally to Peter Parker, or where he was actually from another dimension, or even where you just kind of held on to that façade until later on in the film?

SOMMERS: No, I think once we settled on Mysterio, it was definitely a challenge to figure out exactly what his plan was going to be, and how he was going to carry it out. Once we decided that it was going to be a deception, or a con, we knew that he was going to be portraying himself as a friend, portraying himself as an ally and a potential replacement mentor to Peter. We knew that we were going to have to then show our cards at some point, and reveal that this was a trick. Where that happens in the movie now is pretty much where we always wanted it to happen. We didn't really want to hold it that much longer.

It’s interesting looking at the film because, structurally, it's very tricky. You essentially have, not a complete story, but a story that has a beginning, middle and end for that first hour, where Mysterio and Spider-Man team up and defeat the bad guys, and Peter gets to go back to his friends. Was that challenging?

MCKENNA: Yeah, that was the big challenge. Is anyone going to buy this? Not only Peter and Nick Fury ... The audience. We wanted to make sure that it's a con artist movie and you want to keep everyone entertained, and not blow the con.

Was Vulture ever supposed to come back? I remember there were reports that he was, maybe, coming back. Was that a consideration at one time?

SOMMERS: I don't really remember that ever being something we were talking about.

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Image via Sony Pictures

You mentioned Nick Fury. That's the other kind of big reveal in the film, that Nick and Maria are actually Skrulls. I know Jon had said that that was a fairly late addition, after he saw Captain Marvel. I was just kind of curious, from the screenwriter's standpoint, was that something that was re-conceived after the movie was shot, was that something you guys were always writing towards?

SOMMERS: We played a lot with that idea for a long time. There were some early, early versions of this movie were Mysterio was a Skrull. So, there were a lot of Skrull versions of the story early on. When you're doing a con artist movie, we sat down and started talking 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?

How far did the Mysterio Skrull version get, or was that just kind of an idea that was bandied about?

SOMMERS: It was an early idea about why he was doing everything he was doing.

MCKENNA: Yeah, I don't think it ever made it to paper, necessarily, but we talked about it for a while. But we talked about a lot of stuff. We spent a lot of time, in a windowless room, with Jon, 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.

It's kind of funny we're talking about all these high intensity things, obviously, Skrulls and Mysterio, but you're telling a story about the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The Peter/MJ relationship is one of my favorite parts of the film, and I was curious if you could kind of talk about building that relationship out a bit more this time around. Was there any debate about maybe not letting her find out that he's Spider-Man?

MCKENNA: Oh, you betcha! There was a lot of debate about—everyone felt like we wanted to have them have a nice kiss by the end of the movie, but also differentiate that from, say, the big romantic moments and kisses that we've seen in previous Spider-Man movies. Then what we were going to do between the start of the movie and that was a topic for much, much conversation, and just when were we going to have them tell each other how they feel and things like that. At some point, someone on the creative team pitched the idea that she would figure out that he's Spider-Man. And in the very moment that he's about to say how he feels, she's just going to say, “Oh you're Spider-Man. I know you're Spider-Man”. That was just one of those moments where we all looked at each other and said, “Yeah, that'll be great”. That's where a whole bunch of other conversations came from, and I think that was sort of the basis for the progression of their relationship, was building it out all around that, just to make it all fit.

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Image via Sony Pictures

SOMMERS: Yeah, that was Watts. Watts, who obviously is not only a brilliant director, but a great writer. I think earlier on, he pitched that she outs him right in the middle of what's supposed to be a romantic scene and it just seemed like a really fun twist on MJ and Peter.

Another thing I was curious about is, again, he’s the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but with Peter you're seeing that he's kind of filling into the role of Iron Man. There's that whole scene on the plane that has the AC/DC music with Happy and everything. I was wondering if you could talk about kind of positioning Peter as someone to kind of take on that mantle. I guess kind of the struggle in this film of making sure that you're telling a story that's within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and has that spectacle, but is also very grounded emotionally and about this teenage kid who's a superhero.

SOMMERS: That's correct. Peter is struggling with basically what we were struggling with when we came on to this movie in terms of, how do you tell an MCU movie without Tony Stark? What does it mean? Where do we go from here? Are there even Avengers anymore? All those questions that we had basically, we got funneled into the movie itself. What does it mean to be a hero in this post-Endgame world? What does it mean to be an Avenger? Are there Avengers? Is Peter an Avenger? Is there a mantle for him to hold? To carry? All that was looming very large both in terms of all of us as creators trying to figure out, what is it? What is an MCU without Iron Man? And all of that suddenly is very real for Peter who's lost his surrogate father and his mentor, and everyone is expecting him to be this next-level hero.

Obviously the big tag ends with not only J.K. Simmons coming back as J. Jonah Jameson, which caused my audience to erupt in applause, but Peter being outed to the world. I was just curious if you guys have discussed sequel plans. Do you know if you're coming back to write another Spider-Man movie? Did you kind of discuss where it goes from there?

SOMMERS: We know nothing. We'll go where they tell us to go, if they want us.

MCKENNA: We would be delighted to do another one, but we haven't heard anything yet.

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