With Spider-Man: Homecoming having now swung in to cinemas and wowed us all – you can find our review here – there were several reveals during the movie that had us all pondering what the ramifications of these would be going forward. Well, some of the powers that be have been addressing said reveals and what they mean for ol’ Web-head and his world.

First and foremost, it’s only fair that we give you a heads-up that there be spoilers up ahead. So, if you’re yet to see Homecoming, we’d advise turning back now before it’s too late. Don’t say we didn’t warn you…

SPOILERS

Still with us? Good.

Right, the big reveals we’re talking about are Michelle dropping in the MJ nickname, Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes holding on to Spidey’s secret identity during the post-credits scene, and Aunt May seemingly finding out that Peter Parker is actually the Wall-crawler seen cracking skulls in Queens.

If you remember, the final shot of Homecoming sees Aunt May open Peter’s bedroom door to find him standing there in his Spider-duds. A perfectly-timed “What the f…” would follow before the film cut to a close. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the decision to have May find out Peter’s secret, screenwriter Jonathan Goldstein explained, “It just sort of diminishes what is often the most trivial part of superhero worlds, which is finding your secret. It takes the emphasis off that, lets her become part of what’s really his life, so it’s not cloak-and-dagger stuff. It’s how does he best use these powers to help the world, help himself and his family, and act responsibly. What’s funny is, when we first went in to Marvel, we said we were imagining that Aunt May would be a Marisa Tomei type, and they kind of exchanged a look, because they were already secretly in negotiations with her. So things worked out well; we were all on the same page.”

Fellow screenwriter John Daley added, “It sets up a fun storyline of having this maternal figure who is supposed to protect this kid, but also knowing this kid is so much stronger than she is, and in fact his job is going to be to protect her, presumably.”

Moving on to the post-credits scene, we saw Adrian Toomes approached by Mac Gargan (a character comic book fans will know better as the villainous Scorpion) and asked about whether he knew Spider-Man’s identity. Of course, we all know that Toomes does know that Peter Parker is the one under the mask, but he chooses to keep this intel to himself. Many took this as meaning that the Vulture was holding on to the information so that he could personally get revenge on Spidey, but director Jon Watts has said that that’s not actually the case. Speaking to EW, Watts clarified, “He gets a moment of redemption and he gets to protect Peter, even though Peter would never know. It’s his way of saying thank you. You couldn’t just rely on the tropes of the villain being a murderer and killing a bunch of people. He had to be redeemable in some capacity in the end and that he believes everything he said, especially about his family. So it was a really fine walk to create a villain that still has that moment of redemption in the end. Those scenes with him and Peter in the house, where he’s driving Peter to the dance – that right there is the reason for doing the movie. That, more than anything else, is what I was looking forward to, and I got to have a lot of fun shooting that stuff.”

Next, there’s the MJ issue. As Homecoming came to a close, one of the final scenes saw Zendaya’s Michelle reveal that her friends call her MJ for short. Previously, it had been rumoured that Zendaya’s mystery role in the film was actually that of Mary Jane Watson, although those stories were constantly debunked. And now, Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige has again moved to reiterate that the MJ line doesn’t mean that Michelle is actually a new spin on Peter Parker’s comic book wife (well, until he scrapped his marriage after making a deal with the devil in the awful One More Day storyline). Feige told IGN, “We never even looked at it as a big reveal necessarily, but more of just a fun homage to his past adventures and his past love. She’s not Mary Jane Watson. She never was Mary Jane Watson. She was always this new high school character, Michelle, who we know there’s an M in Michelle and an M in Mary. So we’re so clever and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if her initials were MJ?’ And then I think it leaked that she would be playing MJ and then it became a whole headache for Zendaya to have to navigate. It was never a big, ‘Oh my God, it’s a big reveal!’ There are big reveals in the movie. That’s not one of them. She’s not Mary Jane Watson. Is she going to date Peter? Are they going to fall in love? She seems to be intrigued with him. There’s a nice chemistry there. Who knows what will happen in the future films.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, was that. Obviously, if you’ve made it this far and haven’t seen Spider-Man: Homecoming yet, we did warn you about a bucketload of spoilers. For the rest of you who’ve taken in the fist-pumping awesomeness of Homecoming, at least you’ve now had a little more background and information on how the film’s big reveals will affect things moving forward. And moving forward they are, with a Homecoming sequel already booked in for July 5th, 2019 in addition to appearances for Tom Holland’s Spidey in next May’s Avengers: Infinity War and its to-be-titled 2019 follow-up.