Could The Amazing Spider-Man Face the Sinister Six?

Now that The Amazing Spider-Man is out in theaters and raking in a lot of money, Sony Pictures has begun talking more about the sequels (including a confirmation that there will be at least two of them). So naturally the question on a lot of lips is "who will be the next villain?", especially given the mid-credits scene that came at the end of the last film. In a Superhero Hype interview with producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach suggests that the answer might be bigger than most fans would have guessed. SHH: Do you feel like you need to stay away from some of the villains that have appeared in the Sam Raimi movies? Or can you redefine them within the context of this new Spider-Man?

Arad: Well, not really. There are so many ways to paint these villains, all of them. As you know, one of the great sagas in the Spider-Man universe is of course the Sinister Six. I think "Avengers" did okay the last time I looked. Tolmach: It's going to be okay. Arad: Yeah, it will survive.

SHH: So are you suggesting you're going to do five Spider-Man movies introducing each villain and then the sixth movie will have the Sinister Six?

Tolmach: It seems like a good model.Arad: It all depends on the stories that one wants to tell, because Spider-Man is really more a depth kind of a story, we have to be careful how many villains we can service, because a relationship with a villain has to be such that it's a story on his own. We attempted to do multiple villains--you've been there--you just need screen time to do it.

The idea of doing multiple movies to build up to a massive super villain team up is a rather ambitious notion, and it's nice to see it tempered with a hint of learning lesson from Spider-Man 3 about not having too many villains introduced at once. Another intriguing possibility is touched on with the next question SHH: Does Sony have the rights to Kingpin? That was a great Spider-Man villain until Frank Miller took him for his run on Daredevil and he became known more as a Daredevil villain, appearing in that movie.

Arad: Believe it or not, Kingpin was on loan to Daredevil, so again, anything that is part of the Spider-Man Universe or introduced in the Spider-Man Universe--without getting too legal beagle here--is an opportunity, and if we have a story that Kingpin is important, I'm sure we can handle that.

The notion that movie audiences might see Peter Parker square off against Wilson Fisk is only marginally less interesting to speculate about than the question of how 20th Century Fox would react to it.