Director Marc Webb has spent WonderCon talking up his Spider-Man reboot, and he revealed one big new detail. While the Lizard is the main villain this time around, the movie will also hint at who Spidey will face in the sequels.
Credit for the scoop goes to Cinema Blend, who asked Webb whether this movie contains any hints as to which villains will show up in any follow-up movie. Webb simply said, "There are." It's anyone's guess what that might mean. It's thought that Oscorp features in the movie, which could set up a return appearance by any Green Goblin incarnation (indeed , let's throw Hobgoblin into that mix, assuming Sony doesn't want to completely retread old ground). The tie-in video game features the Rhino and a pre-transformation Morbius, and it's possible the movie could also incorporate one or both of them in some way. Or it might be someone else altogether, much like how Dylan Baker had bit roles as a pre-Lizard Dr. Curt Connors in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies. Either way, just remember - we've got exactly two words from Webb to go on here.
Moving on, Webb expanded on his brief confirmation by promising that this is still very much its own, independent movie:
The movie is conceived first and foremost to work as its own entity but there are certain things like the story of his parents that emotionally and narratively are the long shadow that's cast over his life. Certainly there are hints to deeper stories but, you know, we've got to finish this before we can get to that so it was important that it function on its own.
At the panel, Webb and producer Matt Tolmach talked some more about how the mysterious loss of Peter's parents hangs over the character in the film. Webb said that Parker is ripped away from his parents when he's only eight years old, and that event has huge emotional consequences that affect and inform the Peter we see in the movie. In particular, he suggested that his attitude and wisecracking sense of humor developed as ways to cope with that loss, and that this translates into Andrew Garfield's "quippy, funny, trickster Spider-Man."
Matt Tolmach added that most previous iterations of the story focus solely on the death of Uncle Ben, but they wanted to look at something that really should have just as much of an impact on him, if not more so. The exact details of the death of his parents are unclear to him and us in the audience, and that creates a giant mystery within him. Peter asks himself enormous formative questions like, "Where am I from?", "Why did my parents leave?", and "Why do I deserve this?"
Webb admitted that they are digging deep into something that hasn't always seemed very important in the comics. Indeed, he explained how he had once met with Stan Lee and asked him why so many superheroes have no parents. Expecting a lengthy, philosophical explanation, Stan Lee instead responded, "I just needed to get them out of the house." I can only hope Stan Lee's cameo in the movie is to show up and explain that to Peter.
Transcript via Bleeding Cool.