Spider-Man: Far From HomeSave

The film opens with an in-memoriam tribute video produced by the Midtown School of Science and Technology — a hilariously rough-cut student production memorializing the Avengers who died in Endgame, set to a poorly licensed Whitney Houston track. Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Vision, and Steve Rogers (presumed retired) are featured in awkward yearbook-style framings. Cut to Peter Parker, eight months after Endgame and the universal restoration event nicknamed the Blip. Half the world has just suddenly returned from a five-year absence. Most of Peter's classmates were dusted alongside him. They have all returned the same age, while everyone who survived the Snap aged five years. Peter is exhausted from being one of the most public superheroes in the world, and is desperately looking forward to a school summer trip to Europe with his Decathlon team.

Peter has a plan for the trip. He is finally going to tell MJ — who he has slowly fallen for over the past year — how he feels. He has bought a black-dahlia necklace at the airport gift shop. Aunt May, who is dating Happy Hogan in the post-Snap chaos, has packed Peter's Spider-Man suit in his luggage just in case. Peter does not want to be Spider-Man on this trip. He wants to be a teenage tourist in Venice. The team arrives in Venice. Peter meets MJ at the hotel and almost confesses his feelings before being interrupted by an elemental water-monster attack on the canals. A masked figure in a fishbowl helmet flies in and defeats the creature. The figure introduces himself as Quentin Beck, a hero from a parallel universe destroyed by similar elementals.

Nick Fury intercepts Peter at the hotel that night and informs him the trip will not be relaxing. Beck — apparently the last surviving hero of his Earth — has been tracking these elementals across the multiverse, and Peter is needed as one of the few available active heroes still on Earth. Fury also gives Peter a pair of high-tech glasses Tony Stark had left for him — the E.D.I.T.H. system, which gives Peter access to satellite-targeted strikes, Stark Industries databases, and global drone networks. The glasses are uncomfortably powerful for a sixteen-year-old. Peter accidentally orders an air strike on a school bully when he tries to use the system, then immediately cancels it.

Peter, MJ, and Beck team up to defeat the next elemental — a fire-creature emerging in Prague. The fight goes badly. Peter is overwhelmed; Beck saves the day with his mystical-energy projection abilities. The two heroes share a quiet drink afterward. Peter, recognizing he has no business deciding who inherits Tony Stark's global infrastructure, hands the E.D.I.T.H. glasses to Beck. The moment Beck puts them on, the film's central twist deploys: Beck is not from a parallel universe. He is not a hero. He is a former Stark Industries holographic engineer named Quentin Beck — fired by Tony Stark years earlier — and his entire performance has been a sophisticated illusion using a private army of holographic drones inherited from his former Stark Industries tech.

Beck's flashback monologue, played out for his crew of fellow disgruntled Stark engineers, lays out the scheme. Beck and his team have been engineering each elemental attack as a public spectacle, with Beck arriving as the heroic savior. Their goal: have Stark's tech-monopoly successor (Peter, by Tony's will) hand the E.D.I.T.H. system over to a credible-seeming hero. Beck plans to use E.D.I.T.H. to make himself the new Iron Man, the new Tony Stark, the new fearless leader of the global superhero industrial complex. He is the world's first villain whose origin is being fired from a tech job. With the glasses now in his possession, his plan is operational. The next elemental — a fusion creature combining all four — will attack London, kill Peter, and let Beck become the savior of Earth.

Peter, processing this catastrophic mistake while wandering through an Amsterdam-area service station, stumbles in front of an oncoming train and dives at the last moment to roll under it. He survives barely. Aunt May calls. He wakes up in a Dutch jail cell where the train staff have detained him as a foreign delinquent. MJ visits him there. Peter confesses everything to her — that he is Spider-Man, that Beck is the villain, that the world is hours from a London catastrophe. MJ, having already begun to suspect his identity from a series of earlier accidental reveals, calmly informs him she had figured it out weeks earlier. Peter and MJ rush to London via a Stark-supplied private flight while Beck activates the final elemental sequence on Tower Bridge.

The London climax is the film's spectacular setpiece. Beck has activated his entire holographic drone fleet across the Thames. The Tower Bridge becomes a battlefield of competing illusions. Peter, in a new black-and-red Iron Spider-style suit upgraded with E.D.I.T.H.-deactivation protocols, fights through Beck's holographic clones and reveals the deception to the watching crowds in real time. Beck, cornered, attempts to launch a self-firing weapon at Peter. The shot misfires and kills Beck himself. Peter retrieves the E.D.I.T.H. glasses and walks away from the wreckage. He confirms his feelings for MJ on Tower Bridge in the rain. They share their first kiss as he swings her across the city.

The film's mid-credits scene is a franchise-redefining reveal. A breaking news broadcast plays on a Times Square jumbotron: Beck's allies have edited and released the footage of Peter unmasking himself in front of his Decathlon team. The video has been doctored to make it appear that Peter ordered the drone attacks on Beck and the elementals. The Bugle's J. Jonah Jameson — now a conspiracy-theorist YouTuber cast with a returning J.K. Simmons — broadcasts the framing on his show. Peter Parker's identity is revealed to the world simultaneously with Spider-Man being framed for murder. The film ends on Peter's panicked reaction. The post-credits scene reveals Nick Fury and Maria Hill have been Skrulls in disguise the entire film — Talos and Soren had been covering for Fury while the real Fury was on a Skrull starship in deep space.

Spider-Man: Far From Home grossed $1.13 billion globally — the highest-grossing Spider-Man film ever at the time and the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2019. Critically, it was widely praised as one of the better post-Endgame entries despite the daunting task of following the most consequential film in MCU history. Jake Gyllenhaal's Quentin Beck was singled out as one of the most charismatic Marvel villains of the era; his hologram-army-as-villainy concept gave the climax a uniquely visual identity. Tom Holland's Peter, having now been mentored, betrayed, and de-mentored by Tony's posthumous gifts, ends the film in genuine peril. The identity reveal cliffhanger directly set up the multiverse stakes of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), which would resolve every plot thread this film established and use the multiverse mechanic to bring back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.