What If...? season 3 will likely arrive on Disney+ next year and one of the biggest surprises Marvel Studios has in store for us may have been revealed early.
There have been rumblings for a while that a Spider-Man villain is going to appear in the show and, if scooper @CanWeGetToast is to be believed, it will be Quentin Beck, a.k.a. the villainous Mysterio. Unfortunately, as we first explained on Toonado.com, no additional details have been revealed.
When it comes to what role the villain will play in the series, there are plenty of exciting possibilities. We'd assume Spider-Man will factor into the story somehow - the first time he's appeared in the since "What If... Zombies?!" - but seeing as Beck once worked at Stark Industries, it's not outside the realm of possibility What If...? will explore his and Tony's history.
If Marvel Studios wants to be really ambitious, then perhaps we'll get long-overdue confirmation that Mysterio did indeed hail from another reality (how else could he have known the MCU was Earth-616, a moniker given to it by Earth-838's Illuminati?). Then again, we're sure there's plenty of fun to be had with stories that have smaller stakes.
In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Mysterio was seemingly killed during his final battle with the web-slinger and got the last laugh after exposing the wall-crawler's secret identity to the world.
Recently, What If...? director Bryan Andrews weighed in on when the show could return. Marvel Studios has already shared a clip from season 3 but only because it was a near-completed episode cut from season 2; unfortunately, it sounds like we'll be waiting a while before getting to watch it.
"They move stuff around. Every time I thought it was like, 'Oh, it's going to be this!' It's like, 'It's going to move a little bit!'" he explained. "So, even I would hate to say something and have people's hopes come up and then have them be dashed because of the beast of production and when things move around."
"I thought that it could come out at the end of the year in 2024 possibly, but that would be tight."
"There's some other group of people that are masterminding when things [release] and they're moving things on the board, and I don't know where we exist on that at this moment, as well as [Marvel Zombies]," Andrews continued. "Zombies, I'm still working on at the same time, and that's going to be crazy and that's coming out, but that keeps moving around too, right? So I wish I could help you but I can't!"
The first two seasons of What If...? are now streaming on Disney+.