1. I looooooove that they really did lean into the whole “huh, that five years thing would be weird, wouldn’t it.” Like, they didn’t lean all the way in, because apparently every single named character from the original movie just so happened to be part of the Blip. (Which, the odds of that are like 0.5^n, for n characters, right? So pretty unlikely.) But I understand the realities of telling a story, and will take “we explicitly explain that it worked this way, have a couple of scenes about how weird it is, and then move on telling the story while largely ignoring it,” because tbh that is how comics deal with their bizarre-ass universes, too. But if they had just ignored the weirdness, it would have been sad and weakened the feel of real continuity.

  2. Because I know Mysterio from the comics, I was already well-prepped for his sudden yet inevitable betrayal, but the Skrull thing in Captain Marvel has introduced enough “well you never know” that it was plausible he might have changed; but it really seemed likely that he was evil from minute one anyway, so yeah, there was a lot of just waiting for that.

  3. Overall, sharply-written, well-acted, engaging movie. And I think it got at the pressures of being Spider-Man in a way that’s kinda different from the usual take — being asked to commit to international travel at the drop of a hat in order to save the world is a lot different from “sometimes I’ll miss appointments because of muggers” or whatever, you know?

  4. Also, they called it Earth-616, which isn’t true (Earth-616 is the comics), but that was just Mysterio, who was lying, and I’m trying to decide if that was meant to be a clever hint that he was lying, or if they actually do think the MCU is just the film version of the mainstream comic universe, as opposed to being another universe in the larger multimedia multiverse. (This is giving way too much thought to the matter, but I feel like Kevin Feige has also given too much thought to this, so.)