Is Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 Making The Same Old Villain Mistakes?
Too many villains spoil the broth... AGAIN
Remember when Spider-Man 3 was a comparative failure and everyone knew immediately that the reason behind it was Sony's insistence on the inclusion of Venom and Sam Raimi's unfortunate inability to balance so many villains (partly through a lack of enthusiasm)? Remember when The Amazing Spider-Man 2 revealed that it too was going to have three villains and everyone KNEW that it was going to struggle?
Remember when Sony then announced that Spider-Man: Homecoming was going to include The Vulture, The Tinkerer and Shocker? It was like they'd learned nothing from the two films that had already killed past iterations of their franchise. But remarkably, Jon Watts' masterful balance ensured that the villains weren't too much. Instead, they had an organic relationship and a logical hierarchy that paid service to the presence of even more villains (some of whom we saw), which is what the other two films missed badly.
But now, there's news that the Homecoming sequel - which definitely shouldn't be called Homecoming 2, but needs must at this stage - and it's SLIGHTLY worrying that it appears that we're going to get a lot of villains again. And without Vulture's gang explaining their dynamic and giving them a framework to tie them together, the old fears about too many villains pulling the plot in too many different directions creeps back in.
So far, it appears that we're going to see Michael Mando's Mac Gargan again (probably as the Scorpion), while Jake Gyllenhaal has been tapped for what is assumed to be Mysterio. And now news has broken that Michael Keaton's Vulture is also back (and if he can be despite being in jail, then there's no reason Bokeem Woodbine's Shocker couldn't ALSO appear). Even assuming that Scorpion uses Vulture to try and find out Spider-Man's secret identity, it's hard to see how Mysterio could fit in with them.
And putting together more hints - specifically that Peter is heading to Britain (at least for a little while) - it could be that Mysterio is kept entirely aside from the other villains with more personal stakes. Given how well the MCU has done with personally driven villains with more nuance recently, that should also set off some warning alarms.
Hopefully, Mysterio would just be a secondary villain (like Rhino in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 but, you know, not sh*t) before he's introduced later as a Sinister Six member when the villains are united in their hatred of Peter Parker by someone like Doc Ock. But then, they've cast Jake Gyllenhaal. There's no way he can't be the top-billed villain, even with Mando and Keaton's plots already seeded.
So back come the worries about balance.
Let's just hope this doesn't end up being a third strike for Sony in their seemingly never-ending quest to make a three villain Spider-Man movie properly work...