Spider-Man: Far From Home’s Intro Was Planned Many Years Ago

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Spider-Man: Far From Home ahead.

Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige reveals that they’ve long planned the opening scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home which answers the public’s most pressing questions about The Snap. The first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to come out after Avengers: Endgame, there’s a lot of lingering mysteries that Far From Home needed to address before tackling Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) latest adventure. And for the most part, they did a great job doing just that, particularly in efficiently explaining how Thanos’ snap and its eventual undoing worked from the general public’s perspective.

Feige has the first few minutes of Far From Home to thank for that. The Jon Watts-directed flick opened with a newscast in MidTown Tech that features a tribute to the fallen heroes of Endgame, complete with Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” as its accompanying music. Newscaster Betty Brant (Angourie Rice) then gives a short explanation on how the school is addressing The Blip and its ramifications. As it turns out, this was always how they planned in kickstarting the flick, and it did work.

Speaking with Screen Rant while doing press junkets for Far From Home, Feige recalls how they first started conceptualizing the film’s introduction scene. It was either Watts or the writers (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) who came up with the idea, mining inspiration from how they opened Spider-Man: Homecoming with Peter’s vlog. The sequence was shot twice as there were some back-and-forth with the details that it needs to address, but in the end, they settled with the most important matters.

Kevin Feige: That was an idea very early on, and I don’t remember how formal it was, but at some point we sat down with Jon and our writers and with Amy, and pitched them Infinity War and Endgame. We pitched them what would happen and the ideas of dealing with the loss of Tony, how different this blip is, how weird it is that it’s five years later and some people are older and some people aren’t. How much fun can that be?

And I think it was probably Jon, or maybe the screenwriters, who was like, “Well, you know what we do? We start the movie off with school news just like we started the last film with Peter’s home movie of Civil War.” And catch them up in a way that is funny, you can literally just spell out the information because it’s the morning news show. And we got more and more specific even as we kept working.

Jon Watts: We shot twice as much as what’s in there, because we thought people were going to have questions about Captain Marvel or whatever. But in the end, once we put it together, we said these are the core things that happened.

Kevin Feige: The biggest thing was people who blipped came back the same age. People who didn’t age five years.

Utilizing the MidTown Tech newscast to address The Blip was a smart move from Marvel Studios since the information was delivered in its most digestible version. There was no need to get into the specific complexities of the events of Infinity War and Endgame because the broadcast was geared towards high school students who probably don’t even pay that much attention about the finer details of the events. Still, it needed to be done for the sake of establishing the world as it is post-Infinity Saga. Using an over-the-top song like “I Will Always Love You” coupled with an amateur video in the tribute also set the film’s lighter tone in a way that still acknowledges this galactic event that only ended eight months ago.

The most important thing Spider-Man: Far From Home‘s intro accomplished, however, is that it head on tackled the most pressing queries coming from Endgame. Once that’s done, the film was able to move on and focus on Peter’s adventure. Granted that much of the narrative is still tethered to previous MCU entries, it was able to focus on advancing Spider-Man’s story. That’s pivotal considering that the movie had a lot of moving elements including Peter’s budding romance with MJ (Zendaya) and the complex plan of Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), adding more to that would’ve made the story convoluted.