Spider-Man: Far From Home could be a much bigger deal than we already thought, and it’s all thanks to a major cameo from an old fan-favorite who pops up halfway through the credits. Not only is it guaranteed to blow a not-significant number of minds, but it also spells out some pretty big things about a Spider-Man multiverse!
Ready?
(HUGE spoilers ahead.)
First, some spoiler space for those with giant screens.
Hi there.
You look rested.
The Very Important Cameo is J.K. Simmons, returning as J. Jonah Jameson, the scene-stealing newspaper editor from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. In the brief mid-credits scene he plays a self-styled conspiracy vlogger railing on about how Spider-Man is a “menace”, backing his claim up with a video provided by Mysterio’s crew in which Spider-Man is selectively edited to appear as if he is the one who murdered Mysterio. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, JJJ outs him as Peter Parker. (Peter, watching, low-key has a Heroic BSoD moment.)
Despite being pretty brief, this scene has the potential to alter, if not the MCU itself, then at least several Marvel movies to come. One, this is obviously HUGE sequel fodder, and two, J.K. Simmons is now canonically part of this Spider-Man franchise AND the MCU.
It also hints at the possibility of a Spider-Man multiverse, which raises multiple questions. Is Spider-Man: Far From Home in the same universe as the Sam Raimi movies? If J.K. Simmons is J. Jonah Jameson in both, then has he met Spider-Man multiple times through his life? Are there different-looking Spideys in their respective alternate universes, but only one J.K. Simmons-looking J. Jonah Jameson, too powerful to be constrained by mere time and space? And, most importantly, does this or does this not kind of, sort of make the Sam Raimi movies part of the MCU?
What makes the theorizing even more fun is that Sony went hard on the idea of a Spider-Man multiverse with Into the Spider-Verse just last year. And, as co-director Rodney Rothman shared in an interview, the animated film almost had Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland reprising their respective Spidey iterations in the same scene. Unfortunately, it was scrapped, mostly out of there being “a lot of anxiety” about “confusing people.”
If the J. Jonah Jameson cameo means anything, though, Sony and Marvel may be warming up to the idea.
