"Spider-Man: Far From Home" Has the Best Post-Credits Scenes of Any Marvel Movie

Gigantic spoilers incoming.

Back in 2008, it was only the cinema’s ushers, production-credit nerds and the last remaining stragglers who discovered the bonus scene added to the very end of Iron Man, in which Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury asked Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative.

Ten years later, smash cut to…

Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige insists he wasn’t playing the long game at the time; it was just a little treat for the superfans. Regardless, it ended up paving the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also kicked off the MCU’s most frustrating trend: post-credits stingers.

Ever since Iron Man, we’ve felt a responsibility to stick around to the very end of the rolling credits, in case there’s another nugget hinting at what might be featured in future instalments. Some of these post-credits scenes have been rich with promise (Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War) while others have been hilarious (the shawarma scene at the end of The Avengers; Captain America walking out like Ferris Bueller to tell us we’d waited for nothing after Spider-Man: Homecoming).

But more often than not, they’re largely baffling and unsatisfying addendums, their nadir being reached by Guardians of the Galaxy 2, which contained five separate buttons, all bad.

And the copycats are even worse! The perpetually self-owning X-Men saga tried to pull off the same with its more recent instalments, embarrassing themselves more and more with each attempt.

If you had asked me two weeks ago, I would have said Hollywood should rule post-credits scenes unlawful, punishable by banishment to the DC Phantom Zone.

But then I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home, which has the two best, funniest, most paradigm-shifting post-credit scenes in the entire MCU. So, now I’m back on board.

If, for whatever reason, you ignored the headline and the massive warning atop the article, I’ll give you one more chance to swing away and avoid spoilers for the end of Spider-Man Far From Home.

So, Spider-Man: Far From Home is one of the funnest, twistiest instalments of the MCU yet; a solid answer to the epic Avengers: Endgame and a decent teen comedy rolled into one.

Plus, it has Jake Gyllenhaal pretending to be a Chris-level super-gent, revealing himself to be a whiny, self-important artiste who wants to capitalise on fake news to fool the world into loving him. It is, what we call, very good content.

Tom Holland’s Peter Parker saves the day, of course, and gets to end his second standalone film by treating MJ (Zendaya) on a swing around New York. Cut to credits.

Except, midway through the credits, we see the end of their date, and director Jon Watts drops two significant bombshells. The first is the return of J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. Not only is Simmons reprising his role from the original Spider-Man trilogy (as perfect casting as we’ve ever seen in comic-book cinema), but he’s now a conspiratorial Alex Jones type with a daily show, not unlike the reinterpretation of his character from the PS4 Spider-Man game. This is great!

But that’s just the amuse-bouche compared with what follows, as Jameson shares pre-death footage of Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio pulling a reverse-Iron Man, and outing Parker as Spider-Man’s true identity (while also setting him up as a bad guy). Dun-dun-dun.

By moving what would effectively be the film's final scene into the credits, Far From Home gets to have its cake and eat it too: we end on the traditional, joyful NYC swing-sesh, but also get the devastating and mildly-melancholy cliffhanger too, not unlike the great Spider-Man 2.

If that had been it, Far From Home would get to claim the post-credits crown. But then, it delivers its best and wildest surprise for the very, very end.

And once more, if you seriously don’t want to know how the final button for Spider-Man: Far From Home changes the game, get the hell outta here!

Once the credits roll, we cut back to Nick Fury and Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill driving away from the carnage, only to see them transform back into Captain Marvel’s shape-shifting Skrull buddies Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and Soren (Sharon Blynn). Turns out Talos, everyone’s fave Aussie alien, had been impersonating Fury the whole time, while Nick took a holiday on some kind of Skrull spaceship. Not only do we get confirmation that Mendo’s still going to be a part of the MCU going forward, it suggests he could have been filling in for Fury throughout the previous Marvel movies as well (don’t forget, they met before the events of all those other flicks). And, is there a chance that Skrulls were stepping in on behalf of any Marvel heroes prior to this moment too?

And that’s not even examining the fact that Marvel has indeed confirmed the Skrulls are going to play a major role in the next phase of the MCU. Whether they’ll be heroes or villains remains unknown. But get ready, because shapeshifters, impersonations and deepfakes are going to sow many seeds of distrust going forward. If we get another Thor film, for instance, how can you really know if that’s Thor Thor and not a Skrull Thor in action? (Ask him to wield Mjölnir, I suppose. But you get the idea...)

Does this also explain how we’re getting a Black Widow movie, after Natasha Romanoff died in Endgame? We all assumed it would be a prequel. Far From Home makes us question everything.