Every Time Tom Holland Let An MCU Spoiler Slip
The Marvel movie-making apparatus is perhaps the most complex, well-managed, and deliberate institution operating in popular entertainment today. Not only is each film expertly crafted in terms of how it presents information to the audience, but the slow reveal of information is also carefully managed across films with clockwork precision, as they work together to create a meticulously crafted epic saga of unprecedented proportions.
At least that's how things were up until 2016. That year, a new agent of chaos entered this system: a real-life god of mischief who rivals Loki himself. Some say he is just a young man named Tom Holland, but we know that he is far more than that. He is the Spectacular Spoiler-Man.
Since his first appearance as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland's tendency to accidentally blurt out Marvel secrets during interviews has become legendary. He has spoiled plot details, endings, even the existence of sequels before they had been officially announced. Who would have guessed that pretty much the only superhero in the MCU with a secret identity would be so bad at keeping secrets?
We've gathered together the stories of every time that Tom Holland accidentally said something about the MCU that he shouldn't have. By the end of this article, hopefully you'll agree with us that despite how much he runs his mouth — or perhaps even because of it — Tom Holland is a true delight, even when he's having yet another accidental "Tom Holland moment."
A leak about a lake
Tom Holland's first known leak occurred on December 9th, 2016, when he was hosting a live video Q and A on Facebook. By this point in time, Holland had made his first appearance as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, but his solo spinoff film, Spider-Man: Homecoming, had yet to premiere.
Surprisingly, the question that led to the leak didn't seem to be fishing for a spoiler. A fan simply asked, "Did training for Billy Elliot prepare you for this role?" The question was referring to Holland's first major showbiz break, when he appeared in the stage musical Billy Elliot at just twelve years old. Holland answered by saying that his dance training definitely prepared him for action movie choreography, and because of this, he liked to do as many of his own stunts as possible.
Everything would have been fine if he had stopped there, but Holland kept going, saying, "There's was a few things that I couldn't do. There was, like, some time where they dangled my poor stunt double under a helicopter and dunked him in a lake." Holland then put his hand over his mouth, saying, "This is live, isn't it?" Apparently, he wasn't supposed to talk about that scene. Holland was crestfallen, saying, "I'm gonna get in so much trouble now. Oh no!"
The scene in question was most likely the big chase scene between Spider-Man and the Vulture early on in the movie, which does indeed end with the Vulture dropping Spidey into a lake.
Spoiling two movies in one sentence
Holland's next slip-up occurred during a Q and A with AlloCiné as part of the press tour for Spider-Man: Homecoming, when one fan asked, "Is there a big storyline between this Spider-Man movie and the next ones?"
Given that Holland's reputation for loose lips was already starting to spread, this seemingly innocent question might have actually been a test to see how much Holland was willing to reveal, as the question assumes that there are going to be multiple Spider-Man sequels, something which Marvel had not yet confirmed.
Somewhere in the world, the evil mastermind who designed that question must have been laughing with maniacal glee, because Holland walked right into the trap, saying "Yes... There is still a lot of room for Peter Parker — and Spider-Man especially — to grow in the next two movies."
The interviewers realized the magnitude of this comment immediately, but it took Holland a minute to figure out what he'd just done. After they spelled it out for him, Holland became highly self conscious about accidentally revealing more than he should for the rest of the interview. Before the interviewers could even finish asking their next question about the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War, Holland responded, "Don't ask!"
After this interview, Holland's tendency to leak was officially a pattern, and so perhaps for good reasons, this was one of the last Marvel interviews that he would ever do alone.
Spidey reveals he's going REALLY far from home
Despite being surrounded by four co-stars this time, Holland let another spoiler slip on April 23, 2018, during an interview about Avengers: Infinity War on Jimmy Kimmel Live. In this segment, Holland was seated alongside Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Pom Klementieff (Mantis), and Paul Bettany (Vision).
The cast was recounting stories about times when they were given fake scripts during filming, because the studio was paranoid about script information leaking out. Kimmel asked which one of the Avengers they were most worried about when it comes to leaks. Immediately, everyone on the couch pointed at Tom Holland. For a moment, this was just a funny joke at Holland's expense. But then, the very next time that Holland spoke, the joke was a joke no longer, as he once again accidentally leaked something.
Holland told what he probably thought would just be a funny story about a time he thought he was reading a fake script, because it said that Spider-Man went into space, but he later realized that the script was real. What Holland didn't realize was that, at this point in time, the fact that Spider-Man was going into space in that film was not public knowledge. Whoops!
It takes a special kind of talent to leak something while surrounded by co-stars who are supposed to be keeping an eye on you, in the middle of a conversation about how much you leak things, but Tom Holland managed to pull it off.
Your friendly neighborhood Spoiler-Man
Tom Holland doesn't just leak things in interviews. This next story shows that if you meet him in real life, he might just spoil something for you in person.
It's become a bit of a tradition for Marvel actors to sometimes show up in random movie theaters on opening weekend to surprise audiences. On the weekend of Avengers: Infinity War's premiere, Tom Holland, along with actor Benedict Cumberbatch and screenwriter Stephen McFeely, decided to show up at a few theaters around Los Angeles to delight some unsuspecting movie audiences with a surprise appearance.
Audiences were less than delighted, however, with how Tom Holland decided to introduce himself. When he grabbed the microphone, Holland said, "I'm alive!" as a bit of a joke on the fact that his character dies at the end of Infinity War. He assumed that the audience had just finished the film, when in truth, they were just about to start it, and so he had just unwittingly spoiled his own character's death to a packed house of eager fans.
In an interview with Yahoo Movies, Stephen McFeely admitted that this instance was one of the rare cases when the spoiler wasn't Tom Holland's fault. McFeely claims that he also thought that they were about to talk to an audience that had just seen the movie, and he was the one who passed that information along to Holland.
This "leak" made our Spidey-Sense tingle
Though most of Holland's slip-ups are clearly legit, it's generally believed that Marvel has also recently started hijacking Holland's tendency to leak as a tongue-in-cheek way to release promotional material to the public.
On June 23rd, 2018, Tom Holland posted on his Instagram a short selfie video from ACE Comic Con Seattle. In it, he apologized for not having any big revelations this weekend about his second solo Spider-Man film. He did say, however, that he just got the script, and he was excited to read it. He then "accidentally" briefly raised up his iPad so that the as-yet unreleased title of the script was briefly visible: Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Conspiracy theorists everywhere had their suspicions somewhat confirmed in a later interview with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, in which Feige stated, "There are certain logistics of the way these movies are made that meant that title would potentially be leaked in some way... so Mr. Holland took it upon himself to leak it for us." We get it. You can neither confirm nor deny, yada yada yada, do all the verbal kung fu you want, Mr. Feige. We're onto you!
This is not the only time that one of Holland's leaks seemed a little fishy. One that was even more blatant occurred in November of 2017, when Holland "accidentally" opened a confidential package from Mark Ruffalo — another famous MCU spoiler — while livestreaming and revealed the previously unreleased poster for Avengers: Infinity War.
Holland gets a Strange babysitter
As of Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel eventually figured out a way to keep Tom Holland's loose lips held together a bit tighter. Since the press tour for that film, Holland has appeared in interviews almost exclusively alongside Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor who, as you can see in the above clip, has a fantastic talent for cutting Holland off any time he starts to stray towards a spoiler.
Whether or not this pairing was intentionally engineered or just a happy accident isn't officially known, but Cumberbatch has made jokes that Marvel sent him out on interviews with the sole purpose of keeping a hand over Holland's mouth. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have also praised Cumberbatch's noble efforts on this front.
This new method has been working pretty well, as we haven't had as many Tom Holland spoilers lately. That may be good for Marvel executives, but it's disappointing for impatient movie fans like ourselves. Thankfully, as you'll see in the next example, Marvel's new method is not entirely foolproof.
This spoiler sparked a quantum leap for fan theories
Even with Cumberbatch at his side, there was one time during the Infinity War press tour where Tom Holland accidentally let slip what seemed like just a little leak at the time that later turned out to not be quite so little after all.
During an interview with Access Hollywood, Holland and Cumberbatch were asked which of them was more likely to get a line wrong during filming. Both admitted that Cumberbatch was, but Holland claimed it was only because Cumberbatch's dialogue was more difficult than his own. Holland started to say, "He has to talk about so much Quantum Realm stuff —" before Cumberbatch abruptly cut him off, saying, "Stuff, just stuff." We don't know exactly what Cumberbatch was thinking then, but if we had to guess, it was probably something like, "I really wish I had a Time Stone about now."
At this point, the phrase "Quantum Realm" had only appeared in the movie Ant-Man. It referred to a mysterious alternate dimension where the normal rules of space and time did not apply, and the easiest way to access it was through Ant-Man's shrinking technology. After Infinity War came out, based on this one throwaway comment, fans began to theorize that the Avengers might end up teaming up with Ant-Man and using the Quantum Realm to undo the damage done by Thanos at the end of Infinity War. As we all know by now, when Endgame hit theaters, those fans were proven right.
The fake leak that got a little too real
After years of leaking major Marvel secrets, pretty much nothing was beyond belief in terms of what Tom Holland might let slip next as Avengers: Endgame approached. That's why it seemed pretty credible when an article came out in January 2019 which claimed that Holland had achieved a new spoiling world record by accidentally uploading the entirety of Avengers 4 to Twitter for a moment, before swiftly taking it down.
Not everyone who read the article at first realized that it had been posted on the comedy site Fantastic Fools, and that this article was, like most things on that website, a work of satire. The most notable person who took the article a little too seriously was Tom Holland himself, who responded on Instagram to the posting of the article saying, "This actually stressed me out. For a second I was like, 'S**t, did I?'"
Poor Tom Holland. He probably thought for a moment that this could be the end of his career. He once even remarked to a fan that if he spoiled one more thing, "They'll shoot me."
In retrospect, this claim seems a little far-fetched, as Marvel probably wouldn't trust the final finished film to Holland, and Twitter also limits the length of videos that can be uploaded to just two minutes. Then again, Holland's superhuman ability to spoil has overcome greater obstacles in the past.
It's not just MCU movies
Can Tom Holland leak a movie that he isn't even in? You bet Jurassican! Holland was in a film in 2012 called The Impossible, and since then, he's remained friends with the director, J. A. Bayona. Because of that, after Bayona was hired to direct Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, he ended up sharing details of the plot with Holland before they had been released to the public. Poor Bayona... someone should have warned him.
In all fairness, it could have been worse. This time, Holland didn't reveal the story to the world at large before Fallen Kingdom's release. There was, however, one person who he told the entire plot of the film to before they were able to learn about it through the proper channels, and that's the star of the Jurassic World films, Chris Pratt, who is also Holland's co-star in the MCU, where he plays Peter Quill/Star-Lord.
In an interview with Sirius XM, Pratt said that he didn't believe Holland's wild story at first, but when he finally read the script, he said to himself, "Yeah, he wasn't messing with me. It's all real."
One final word of advice for future casting directors who are considering bringing Tom Holland into their own franchise: wherever he goes, Spoiler-Man brings his superpower with him. So don't tell him anything, don't do any interviews live, and maybe see if your writers can also squeeze in a role for Benedict Cumberbatch.