Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead for Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Did Spider-Man: Far From Home actually kill off Mysterio? The latest Marvel blockbuster introduced viewers to Quentin Beck, a.k.a. Mysterio, a classic Spider-Man villain created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko back in 1964. In the comics, Mysterio was a Hollywood stunt artist and VFX expert who decided he wasn't getting the fame and acclaim he deserved, and launched a life of crime instead.
The MCU has redesigned Mysterio, turning him into a Machiavellian mastermind who has orchestrated a plan to fake being a superhero. A former employee of Tony Stark's, Mysterio has used BARF technology and weaponized drones to simulate monstrous Elemental beings. Mysterio's villain plan was to make himself look like the hero who saves the planet from the Elementals, and thus becomes as celebrated as the likes of Iron Man. His scheme goes well until Spider-Man: Far From Home's third act, when Peter Parker begins to disable the drones and the illusions fail. It all comes down to a final, no-holds-barred confrontation between Spider-Man and Mysterio - one with an apparently fatal conclusion.
Mysterio and Spider-Man do battle in an enclosed space, which in theory should play to Mysterio's advantage; the wall-crawler wouldn't have room to maneuver, and Mysterio has already demonstrated that his illusions can bend Peter's perception of space. What Mysterio doesn't count on, however, is Spider-Man's Spider-Sense, which allows Peter to differentiate between truth and fiction. Spider-Man is able to almost effortlessly neutralize the drones surrounding him, and presses on towards Mysterio. In one last, desperate magic act, Mysterio uses a fake version of himself to make a sneak attack on Spider-Man with a gun. Peter dodges the gunshot, and the rogue bullet ricochets back and kills Beck himself. But did Mysterio actually die, or was it just another elaborate hoax? We're going to say that, yes, Mysterio is dead - but Spider-Man: Far From Home does leave a lot of suggestions he could be retconned to survive.
Indeed, Mysterio makes his return in Spider-Man: Far From Home's mid-credits scene to frame Spider-Man and reveal his secret identity. The suggestion is that this was a posthumous contingency plan enabled by his henchmen, with them creating and sending the video to J. Jonah Jameson at TheDailyBugle.net. But could this be the actions of someone who's faked their death, working in the shadows to further manipulate the masses?
Certainly, viewers are wise to question the evidence of their own eyes when it comes to Mysterio. The MCU has long had a reputation for fake deaths; in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Nick Fury's death was a fake-out even though audiences were shown the body. In Mysterio's case, the villain is a master of illusion, and he's already demonstrated the ability to create fake versions of himself over the course of the film.
But the script of Spider-Man: Far From Home anticipates this. As a result, it features dialogue in which Peter asks EDITH - the artificial intelligence he's been entrusted with by Tony Stark - whether or not Mysterio's death is real. EDITH confirms that it is, thus reassuring Peter that the threat of Mysterio is well and truly over; there's a strong sense in which EDITH's words are really for the benefit of the audience, telling viewers they can believe that Mysterio is indeed dead.
It's an ironic end for Mysterio, whose tricks were based on a near-absolute mastery of the environment he was operating in. In the end, the Spider-Man villain is killed by his own bullet, in an accidental ricochet resulting from the enclosed space he was in.
