Avengers: Endgame spoilers ahead. With this morning's release of the new trailer for Spider-Man: Far from Home came some more huge news. The next Spider-Man movie will introduce the concept of the multiverse, an alternate universe much like our own, to the MCU. So if the multiverse exists, does that mean in some other timeline Tony Stark is still alive?
The new trailer opens with Peter (Tom Holland) and Happy (Jon Favreau) lamenting the tragic loss of Iron Man. At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark uses his newly-created Iron Infinity Gauntlet to snap Thanos and his minions out of existence, but the intense power of the device and the act take his life. He's bid farewell at a funeral attended by many of the Endgame characters in a send-off fitting of his influence.
But Iron Man’s presence is still intensely felt in the newly-released trailer. “Everywhere I got, I see his face,” Peter says. Obviously Tony was a huge influence on Peter, and being that Peter lost his own father figure in the form of Uncle Ben, he looked to Tony to fill that void. Now Peter must learn to make it on his own, as both a superhero who has lost their mentor and a person who has lost someone they considered family.
The big reveal in the latest trailer is that MCU newcomer Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Mr. Beck, a.k.a Mysterio, isn’t from our world at all. As Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) explains, “Beck is from Earth, just not ours. The snap tore a hole in our dimension.” It’s unclear to which snap Nick is referring, since in the saga of Infinity War and Endgame there were a total of three snaps. The first was when Thanos wiped out half of the population of the universe in Infinity war. The second comes when Hulk uses the time-captured Infinity Stones from the past to snap them back into existence, and the third and final at the end of Endgame when Tony snaps Thanos and the bad guys away.
But the rupture between dimensions might also have to do with the fact that the Avengers took so many Infinity Stones out of their timelines. As the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) tells Hulk/Bruce in Endgame, removing the stones from any point in time would create an alternate timeline, a break from their own universe. Of course, she and Bruce also theorize that if they put all of the Infinity Stones back where they belong in their original time, then no breaks would occur.
We know that Captain America goes back to each point in time to return each of the Infinity Stones, but what if it didn’t work? We also know the gang already kind of messed up 2012 when Loki escaped with the Tesseract, and Cap returning to live his life with Peggy could also have created some kind of rift. It’s possible they didn’t stick the landing as far as returning the stones goes. What if, in addition to the “main timeline” that we’ve watched unfold in all of the MCU movies, there are now six additional timelines running simultaneously?
That would mean that each character has an alter-ego in six different multiverse dimensions. And since Mysterio is able to cross from his world into Spidey’s, perhaps Tony Stark can as well. Killing off beloved characters and bringing them back to life is practically comic book tradition, and we saw the possibilities of the multiverse in the movie Doctor Strange.
Reuniting with his lost mentor would mean a lot to Peter Parker, and regaining one of the franchises favorite actors and characters would be a shocking but welcome move. It’s still pretty unlikely, however, considering the fact that Robert Downey Jr. has continually insisted that his days playing Iron Man are over. But the suggestion of a multiverse implies that any of our lost characters can come back. Black Widow, Gamora, and yes even Thanos could still be alive and well in another dimension, as could different versions of those still alive in ours.
The other possibility, that Slash Film explores, is that Mysterio is just flat out lying. The character is a villain in the comics, so he could just be telling Fury he’s from another dimension as a part of his evil plan. “Comic book Mysterio is a con man. A sham. A liar. A petty crook. A failed visual effects genius who uses technology and complex illusions to create the image of “real” super powers,” Slash Film writes. So Cap may have gotten the stone return right after all, and like Peter, we’ll just have to continue to mourn Iron Man as a great loss.
