Did ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ Quietly Introduce a New Villain to the MCU?
Spider-Man: Far from Home created so much drama both on and off screen, that even some vigilant fans didn’t notice it introduced a character who could spell bad news for the web-slinger in the future.
And no, we’re not talking about that very strange end credits scene that told us we couldn’t trust our own eyes and ears. We’re talking about one of the background players who barely figured in the movie.
Who is the Beetle?
We can’t explain who this secret villain is without getting into spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Far From Home yet, we’ll see you when you have.
Remember how Mysterio seemed like a good guy when he was really secretly a bad guy? That wasn’t a big surprise even for casual Spidey fans who know Mysterio is the illusionist villain who has a goldfish bowl for a helmet. The surprise was whom he was working with.
Far From Home revealed that Mysterio was in league with a bunch of disgruntled employees of Stark Industries who wanted to get their hands on EDITH, the AI tech glasses that the departed Tony had given to Peter Parker. According to Screen Rant, one of those dissatisfied employees was the bartender, Janice Lincoln, played by Claire Rushbrook. She looked benign, but she turns out to be quite malevolent.
In the comics, Janice Lincoln was given the Beetle armor by Baron Zemo, whom we saw in Captain America: Civil War, to take on Black Widow and Bucky Barnes. Janice gave Natasha Romanoff a drugged drink while posing as a bartender.
More troubling was that she was recruited into the all-villains group the Sinister Six, kind of the Marvel version of the Suicide Squad villains gang.
What about that ending scene?
As for the ending of Spider-Man: Far From Home, it depends on which one you’re talking about. The mid-credits scene saw Mysterio causing trouble even after he was dead. He had video-recorded himself revealing Spider-Man’s secret identity. J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle loudmouth who despises Spider-Man, got a hold of that video and broadcast Peter Parker’s secret to the whole world.
The movie implied that it was Janice Lincoln who discovered the secret identity. So it’s quite possible that she could come back in the next Spider-Man movie to cause more trouble.
That movie is scheduled for July of 2021, but so little is known about that movie, that it doesn’t even have a proper title yet. It’s just known as Spider-Man 3, and that will certainly change because that title has been used by another Spider-Man movie that many people do not have fond memories of.
As for that other ending scene, which revealed that Nick Fury and Maria Hill were really the Skrulls Talos and Soren, it is not yet known what, if anything that will have to do with the Beetle or the provisionally titled Spider-Man 3.
This whole plan almost fell apart
All this talk of endings is kind of funny in hindsight because this planning was almost for naught. After Far from Home was released, news broke that Disney and Sony had reached an impasse on their deal to share Spider-Man, which looked like it meant that Spider-Man would have to leave the MCU.
Some 11th-hour wheeling and dealing mended fences, so that one more Spider-Man movie, and presumably one more Marvel movie with Spider-Man in it, could go forward.
Even if the Beetle does not figure into Spider-Man 3, she may very well figure into the Sinister Six. Sony had planned to make a Sinister Six movie on their own, and dropped hints of it in Amazing Spider-Man 2, but those plans went by the boards when Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed.
Now that the Spider-Man world has been revived by the Sony/Disney collaborations and by Sony’s own movies Venom and Into the Spider-Verse, chances are greater than ever that the Beetle will appear in some capacity other than as a bartender.
