All was going fine until mid-way through our first viewing, 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, on Sunday afternoon. The kids were enjoying it, laughing in the right spots, providing the sort of commentary about the action that indicates full engagement.
Then I realized that our viewing of the Marvel movies out of sequence would finally have its first negative repercussions when we got to the next movie.
Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first movie released after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the official beginning of the MCU's Phase Four. Where spoilers had never been a problem previously, they would immediately become so at this juncture.
And though I'm sure you've seen Avengers: Endgame, now would be the correct time to issue a SPOILER ALERT.
Until now, the only things that could be "spoiled" from earlier Marvel movies were various plot-based twists and turns in the serpentine narrative, which is now 27 movies in length, and was already 21 at the time Endgame was released. Because these are superhero movies, the hero generally survives, leaving only weird references to Sokovia and the like as unexperienced events that could throw my kids for a loop, but only momentarily as they would just forget them and move on.
The death of Tony Stark, however, changed all that.
And while I heard my kids laughing and providing commentary, my mind raced ahead to how I was going to deal with the fact that they didn't know this had happened. It was like my worries of The Empire Strikes Back being prematurely spoiled all over again.
Watching the Avengers movies before Saturday was out of the question, even if I were inclined to do so. Even just watching Endgame was out of the question, as I would never dream of depriving someone of at least Infinity War as part one of the two-part story. I would also never dream of watching a three-hour movie with my kids, especially not this week. Then there's the fact that Infinity War contains what I consider the most shocking and potentially traumatizing moment in the entire MCU, the strangulation death of _____ by Thanos at the beginning. (I didn't give a spoiler warning for Infinity War, so I'll just leave out the name of that character.) It's that exact moment that caused me to wade into MCU viewings with my kids only very gingerly. It might be even more traumatizing considering that we only recently watched and quite enjoyed a show devoted entirely to this character. (Oops, so much for being vague.)
But I didn't want to abandon these viewings either. I need to get in Spider-Man: No Way Home on before I close off my 2021 rankings. With the hype it has received, not seeing it in time to rank it is just not an option.
I thought of just skipping Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is like a non-stop Tony Stark memorial from start to finish. (Or from Stark to finish, you could say.) At least the kids would have one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie before seeing the newest one. But as I had already promised them both movies, I couldn't really renege now. Nor, as a proud film enthusiast and curator, did I consider it responsible to show them the third in a trilogy without showing them the second.
So I decided to put the issue to them and see what they wanted to do about it.
Tuesday afternoon I asked the older one, who is 11, the question you see in the title of this post. He was helping me put a shade cover on our new trampoline at the time.
"Something about Thanos gathering infinity stones to wipe out half the population."
"That's Avengers: Infinity War," I explained. "What do you know about Endgame?"
"Then nothing I guess," was the response.
The playground chatter that had given him the details of Thanos' master plan had not produced the end result from the second movie. I guess a bejeweled glove is more fascinating to the playground crowd than the death of Iron Man.
So I asked him what he thought of the fact that there would be spoilers from Endgame in the next Spider-Man movie. When he asked what kind of spoiler, I said it had to do with characters dying.
"No, I want to avoid that," he said.
Damn.
I punted for now and returned my focus to attaching the trampoline roof.
Because I had deemed Tuesday the best time to watch Far From Home before Saturday, and around 5:30 the best time to schedule the watch, I had to return to the topic later on, this time involving his brother.
I said we could either watch it and have the spoiler occur, or we could skip this movie and just go straight to third -- which a friend had told me did not include very much, if any, talk of Stark's death, if he remembered correctly.
The older one wanted to skip, the younger seemed horrified by that idea.
We settled on the compromise that I and my eight-year-old would watch Far From Home, and my 11-year-old would skip it. But almost immediately, he decided that if we were going to watch the movie he would just watch it as well.
As it turned out, I almost didn't need to worry.
One of the very first things that happens in the movie -- after the cold open featuring Michael Keaton's Vulture -- is a tribute on Peter Parker's high school news program to the fallen Avengers. Not just Stark, but also Captain America, Black Widow and Vision. I sat there their cringing at the enormity of the information being dumped on them. (After all, we'd watched Vision in Wandavision as well.)
You know what? Went right over their heads.
Huh?
Kids are funny sometimes.
I have to wonder if they didn't process it because they thought they knew how movies worked, and there was no way any of these characters could be dead. (Is Steve Rogers dead or is he just really, really old?)
When I was able to exhale, I ventured a pause to make sure they understood what The Blip was and how it worked, how some characters were gone for five years and then came back.
"Don't spoil it!" the 11-year-old said. "Wait is that the spoiler?"
I hit play again without confirming or denying.
It went on this way, becoming more comical with each oblique reference to Tony's death. And by "oblique" I don't mean the references were indirect to any normal adult. My children apparently needed someone to say "Tony Stark is dead" for them to actually get that this happened.
Phrasing very close to that, which could not be mistaken for anything else, finally occurred during the "nightmare" that Mysterio creates for Spider-Man, one of several illusions Mysterio creates whose logistics are basically impossible to understand. At this point it took the eight-year-old to finally ask the question:
"Wait, did Tony Stark die?"
By way of confirmation, I put my hand on his back.
The revelation didn't derail anything. The laughter and the commentary continued. The kids loved the movie -- one or both of them called it their favorite of all time, which is something they say after basically every movie they see. (Most recently: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) I myself liked the movie a lot better than I had the first time. I still find the Mysterio stuff kind of weak, but anything related to the high school students is gold, and I like Zendaya a lot more these days than I ever used to.
Some concern for Tony did finally arrive during the closing credits, at which point, the 11-year-old asked if Tony had come back to life yet in the ensuing Marvel movies. Maybe they get how these movies work after all.
"Not so far," I said, helpfully leaving the door open for his eventual resuscitation, if any emotional comfort was needed in that moment, if there had been any tainting of another recent first-time viewing -- the original Iron Man.
It doesn't seem that there was. They were screaming and bouncing on the trampoline a few minutes later.
"Not so far," my response to the prospect of Tony returning, was not a lie. I get how these movies work too. You telling me we're never going to see Iron Man in a movie again? Of course we are. He just won't be played by Robert Downey Jr. (Or maybe he even will be. Never rule anything out. The aforementioned Michael Keaton is playing Batman again, isn't he?)
So a tricky scenario tackled in the best way it could have been tackled: head on.
And at least now they'll have the context for all the ways I imagine their noodle is going to be fried in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I won't be able to pause this one to explain anything that's happening, including the Easter Eggs for the five live action Spider-Man movies that they haven't seen.
My wife, who was expecting to be busy during that block of time, may actually join us for the viewing. She probably hasn't seen a Spider-Man movie since the Tobey Maguire original. Let's hope her adult brain can just go with it in the moment.
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