There is a lot of hype surrounding Spider-Man right now. Not only is Marc Webb’s ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ hitting theaters this year, but also Marvel Comics is bringing the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker, back from the dead and back into continuity in an all-new volume of ‘Amazing Spider-Man’. While those things are both very awesome, the wall-crawler isn’t the only character from the Spidey-verse to be taking large strides in the entertainment biz. Last month, Sony announced that they would be expanding the world of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ by putting some of our hero’s greatest villains in spinoffs of their own.
In a very informative interview with IGN, Roberto Orci shared a number of details about ‘Venom’ and ‘The Sinister Six’, which he is contributing to as part of a brain trust also including Alex Kurtzman, Ed Solomon, Jeff Pinker, and Drew Pearce. After debunking the rumor that the friendly, neighborhood web-slinger won’t be the focus of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 4’ and explaining that those previously announced dates for sequels aren’t just placeholders, Orci discussed the challenges of creating a movie focused on the Sinister Six:
“That’s the discussion we’re having right now; how exactly do you do that, and how do you do it without betraying the audience and making them all mean? Drew Goddard [of ‘Cabin in the Woods’] is going to be writing that one, so it’s kind of his problem. [Laughs] I’m kidding. We’re all working on each other’s stuff. So we want to be true to it, but there are some antiheroes in this day and age. There’s been examples of that even on TV — Vic Mackey on ‘The Shield’, one of the great antiheroes of all time. There are ways to milk that story. Audiences have seen everything. They’ve seen all the good guys who never do anything wrong. Is there a story in seeing the other side? That’s the challenge, and that’s the fun. I’m not sure how we’re going to do that yet.”
Next, the writer touches on the fact that Oscorp is the major thread connecting all these villains together, so the company and the family who run it will be a big part of the expanding Spider-Man universe at Sony rather than have something like the Venom symbiote come from outer space:
“Oscorp plays an important part in how our villains get created, obviously, in the first one. So because Peter becoming Spider-Man came out of that, rather than saying, ‘And then this alien came from space’, or whatever, they’re doing human-hybrid, weird stuff at Oscorp. That’s where Gwen Stacy works anyway as well. So the idea of it representing the good and the bad of science, that it can do great things, but it can also mess you up and do weird things and transform people — as all science can be used for good or bad. So it’s nice to have that organizing principal, but it wasn’t like, ‘We must keep it at Oscorp’. It flowed naturally from the story development.”
Finally, after some talk about their audience being primed for some anti-heroes thanks to shows like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘The Sopranos’, Orci talks about how this approach to the Spider-Man films and it’s spinoffs takes him and Kurtzman back to their roots of television, so their approach to these films isn’t as complicated as many would think:
“It feels very familiar, because Alex and I started in television. In television, you get a great team of writers together, a writing staff, and you’re working on five episodes at once. You’re prepping one, you’re shooting one, you’re writing one, you’re posting one, and you’re trying to make sure they’re consistent over 13 or 22 episodes. That’s how we learned how to do things. So it’s funny in the movie business, and you have different things being done by different teams and they’re not all communicating with each other. So when we talked about our interest in all this stuff, we said, ‘Well, the way would want to do it is kind of go to a TV model’, and then the distinction between the quality of TV and film has gone away. They’re both equally viable, awesome storytelling formats. So the idea of, let’s get a core group of writers and producers and directors — and even though I might not be the one writing Venom, I’ll be in the meetings talking about how to make it interesting. We could be putting in easter eggs and planning ahead in the previous movies, and then that guy over there is going to write that movie, and Ed Solomon’s gonna write another one with us. So having a committee, a board, of people who are creative, who are filmmaker, who just keep it all together, that’s kind of going back to the way we started.”
The whole interview is well worth the read if you’re interested in the direction that Orci and his crew are planning on taking Spidey and his superior foes in the years to come. He also vaguely goes into some detail about whether Venom will be Eddie Brock or Flash Thompson. If either of those things sounds enticing to you, go ahead and click back to the source to read the whole thing.
When you’re done with that, let us know what you think about Roberto Orci and company’s approach to ‘Venom’, ‘The Sinister Six’, and the upcoming sequels to ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ in the comment section.
