“Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg.” “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” “Dewey Defeats Truman.” What do these iconic headlines all have in common? They’re complete failures, because they didn’t create a “curiosity gap” by strategically withholding information from readers about the story in the headline. Giving readers less information—“A Body Was Found in a Topless Bar, and You’ll Never Guess What Was Missing,” say—leads to more readers, greater engagement, a better informed electorate, and, ultimately, a grand rebirth of American democracy. Which is all to say that we probably shouldn’t have told you in the headline that the next Tom Holland Spider-Man movie is going to be called Spider Man: Far From Home, but we’re glad you clicked on this story anyway.
Spider-Man actor Tom Holland revealed the name “by accident” in an Instagram post in which he apologized for not having any big news about the upcoming Spider-Man movie, then flashed what was ostensibly his copy of the script on an iPad, complete with full title:
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the media omitted the name “on purpose” in their headlines, in a noble effort to better inform the public about the services and products offered by their advertisers. Slate, on the other hand, respects your intelligence—yours, personally! You!—far too much to ever stoop to that level, and we want you to know how much we appreciate the mutual respect and admiration that led you to click on this story despite having already learned from the headline that the next Spider-Man film with Tom Holland will be called Spider-Man: Far From Home. Spider-Man: Far From Home is technically not the next Spider-Man film, because the animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse will precede it, which is exactly the kind of clarifying detail Slate trusts its readers to understand and use wisely.
And it’s that spirit of mutual respect and understanding that leads us to assure our readers that we would never take advantage of the fact that people in the future might be googling for the trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home and attempt to hijack that traffic, and that is why this trailer we have embedded below—which is not the brand-new trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home, since that trailer doesn’t exist yet, but is instead a VHS trailer for the 1989 Drew Barrymore serial killer film Far From Home—has been clearly labeled “The Trailer From Far From Home But Not The Trailer from Spider-Man: Far From Home,” in accordance with journalistic best practices.
Democracy may die in darkness, but as we all know, Spider-Man turns off the dark. The next Spider-Man film with Tom Holland is going to be called Spider-Man: Far From Home.
