The following story, obviously, contains massive spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.
If you're anything like me, Spider-Man: No Way Home seemed like an abstract idea for a long, long time, and it's kind of unbelievable that it's finally arrived for us all to see. We knew that we were getting Tom Holland's Peter Parker, along with friends MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon). Hell, at the end of the franchise's last installment, Spider-Man: Far From Home, we learned that J.K. Simmons was back as a new InfoWars-style version of J. Jonah Jameson. Fun! And in the numerous trailers and marketing for No Way Home, we learned that past villains like Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) would be returning. Unconfirmed rumors also constantly swirled that past Spider-Mans—Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield—would also be making the multiversal jump, while Garfield and Holland kept saying "nope" in the press. The movie arrived, with no one really knowing for sure.
Well, if you've seen the movie...you know what the answer to that question ended up being. Just about everyone you could have hoped for is in Spider-Man: No Way Home, from Simmons, Dafoe, and Molina, to Garfield and Maguire, to even the lesser villains like Jamie Foxx's Electro and Thomas Haden Church's Sandman. The gang's all here!
And No Way Home, along the way, makes for a story and adventure that feels new, unique, and complete. If the Tom Holland MCU Spidey franchise were to end here (at the end of his first in-world trilogy), it would be a satisfying ending. Luckily, though, we know this to likely not be the case, and the credits scenes help us get a glimpse of what's likely coming next.
Let's get into it, shall we?
Credits Scene 1: Heeeeere's Venom!
As anyone who saw Venom: Let There Be Carnage could tell you, that film's credits scene sure was setting up...something. With Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) on a beach vacation, sitting in his bed, talking to Venom (the voice in his head, of course), everything around him suddenly transformed and shifted. And when this all concluded, an unmasked Peter Parker (played by Tom Holland) was on his hotel room TV. Venom sinisterly looked on, and we cut to black.
No Way Home's first credits scene picks up from here, and we can now tell exactly what happened; just like Doc Ock, Norman Osborn, Electro, etc, Eddie/Venom was transported from his own dimension to the MCU when Peter messed with Doctor Strange's spell. The scene here finds a confused Eddie (of course, still going back and forth with the Venom voice in his head) coming to terms with what's happened, talking about some Spider-Man MCU happenings with a bartender in a Mexican resort played by Ted Lasso's Cristo Fernández (Football is life!).
"You're saying this whole place is, just, tons of super people," Eddie asks at the bar. "There was a billionaire, he had a tin suit, and he could fly. Right? And there was a really angry green man."
Just as Venom wants to go skinny dipping (it is a vacation, after all), Eddie decides that, you know, maybe it's a good idea for him to go talk to this "Spider-Man." But then Eddie and Venom transport back to their own dimension, just like we saw Doc Ock, Goblin, and both Spideys do. (Between varying perspectives on The Blip and now varying perspectives on sending other Spidey-verse people back to their home dimensions, Marvel seems to love this kind of surprise. It does always come as a shock somehow!)
Just when it seems like the Venom: Let There Be Carnage tease—sending Venom directly into the MCU world!—may have been a bit of a fake-out, we see that Eddie left a tiny bit of the good stuff behind. That's right: a tiny bit of black, alien symbiote goo is sitting on the bar, as the scene cuts to black.
Does this mean that the MCU is setting up the opportunity to do its own take on the alien symbiote story (previously covered cinematically in both Spider-Man 3 and the Venom movies). Could Tom Hardy's Eddie make his way back to fix this? Will we get another Eddie? Will the symbiote link up with someone else? There are a lot of questions to be answered, and we're eager to see how the next round of Spider-Man deals with this curious development.
Credits Scene 2: Welcome to the Multiverse
The second credits scene for Spider-Man: No Way Home is a lot more straightforward: it's a teaser trailer for the next Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to come down the pipeline, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The movie is scheduled to come out, as of now, on May 6, 2022.
The trailer gives us a just a small glimpse, a little taste, of what the much-awaited movie (directed by Spider-Man's Sam Raimi!) will have in store.
Seemingly picking up just after the events of No Way Home, the film follows Doctor Steven Strange dealing with the aftermath of all the multiversal tampering he's just witnessed. He links up with Wanda, who mentions her regret about what happened in Westview; Strange tells her he's not here to talk about that, and that he is simply seeking her help to protect the universe.
Throughout the rest of the trailer, we see a few more flashes; Baron Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) now has long hair and seems to be keeping his promise about no longer wising to help anyone from the Sanctum, and we also see a one-eyed monster in the street, either Shuma-Gorath or Gargantos, just wreaking havoc.
But the real money shot comes at the end of the trailer, when our Doctor Strange comes face-to-face with Strange Supreme, a power-hungry variant of Doctor Strange who What If...? fans already saw in the animated series last summer. That version of Doctor Strange is one who "lost his heart" instead of his hands; when Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) died, Strange went to extreme lengths, taking on all sorts of multiversal universe power in an attempt to prevent it.
That version of Doctor Strange says to our version of Doctor Strange "Things just got out of hand…," and the text on screen tells us again: Doctor Strange Will Return.
It's hard to read too much into this, as it's simply a teaser trailer. But we can expect another massive story, and, likely, some fun cameos and guest appearances from stars of other Marvel universes. Some X-Men? Seems like a good spot. Fantastic Four? Maybe less likely, but who knows? And it sure would seem like a good spot for our new pal Kang the Conqueror to make a splash, right? Only time will tell. We're all in.