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If there's one thing we've learned from the Superman and Spider-Man film franchises, it's that selling your audience on the same villain over and over again is a difficult thing to do.
Audiences like variety, particularly in a genre of film where the quality, the stakes and the number of voices are always increasing. Feeling too much like your last film -- especially if that last film was enough of a dud to require a reboot -- can be deadly.
So as we enter the third new Spider-Man series in fifteen years, we have to wonder: What is the best way for Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures to move forward?
We already know the filmmaker, we know the actor and we know the general gist of how they want to handle the character (no origin story, but yes to being back in high school). So...what about the villain?
A superhero movie is only as good as its villain, and while not all of the movie versions have been instant classic, Spider-Man has one of the greatest rogues galleries in the business.
The Jackal
The fact that the Clone Saga dragged on way too long for its own good notwithstanding, The Jackal is actually a really interesting villain with unique ties to Peter -- and the original clone story was cool enough to justify spinning years of derivative tales out of it, so there has to be SOMETHING to this guy, right?
Honestly, his biggest downside is how connected he is to Gwen Stacy...and it seems wildly unlikely we'll see her in the near future. Not only did Emma Stone just revolutionize the way fans think of the character, making her a near-impossible act to follow, but it seems likely Marvel is taking the movies more in the direction of the comics -- that is to say, away from supporting casts that don't directly feed into some big, event-driven conflict.
Chameleon
Spider-Man is by his nature more "human" than most characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and if you wanted to go with a suitably intimate challenge, you could easily use The Chameleon. Espionage, impersonation, identity theft, secret identity woes -- you name it.
And, yeah, in my perfect world we could get a tortured version of the character, like in the scene depicted above, where he was holding a gun to a "hostage" who turned out to be an illusion, revealing a lost and unraveling Chameleon holding a gun to his own head and crying out for attention.
Kraven the Hunter
Probably the character most frequently discussed by Sony and the previous batch of filmmakers as someone they'd like to get to, Kraven has two major advantages: he was the villain at the center of one of Spidey's greatest and most self-contained stories of all time in the form of Kraven's Last Hunt...and he has a very effective modern reinvention in Ultimate Spider-Man as basically a reality show bounty hunter.
It would be easy to find a version of this character who would connect to audiences and, given his flamboyant nature but limited powers, keeping him grounded and relatable but the challenges he presents "big" is little challenge.
Morbius
This is a character who seemed to be teased a little bit during the Amazing Spider-Man franchise, and many fans were receptive to.
With a rich mythology of his own and spinoff potential, he's got some stuff in common with studio- and fan-favorites like Venom. Still, Morbius has never really had as much time to shine as other Spidey foes with an equally high profile in the comics...and why not?
If there's a downside, it's that "vampire" is kind of a generic concept for a villain at this point, but Morbius is interesting enough to get past that with all but the most jaded viewers.
Venom
Look, we know. Venom has already been in a movie.
But that movie sucked, and their take on Venom was a big part of why. It's a character with a large base of fans and a mythology that can be mined for plenty more story beyond just the first go 'round. There's a reason why Sony always wants to make a Venom stand-alone film and to tease him in all their Spider-flicks. Marvel ought to indulge them in that.
And you can't get Carnage, a fantastic candidate for a future film, without Venom
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