With so many Spider-Man movies out there, there are a lot of Spider-Man villains.
We're taking a look back at the many, many supervillains that Spidey's battled against.
Beware: some gigantic spoilers ahead.
Stop the video now if you're not up to date on every Spider-movie!
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is, even more than Spider-Man 3 before it, an overstuffed movie
that banks on interconnectivity to help drive excitement for a sequel that ultimately never
came.
At the time, Sony Pictures was attempting to push ahead with its own cinematic universe
with Spider-Man at the heart.
When it didn't work, we ended up with Spider-Man in the MCU.
Watching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 today is mostly an amusing exercise in seeing someone
try to build a universe that never quite comes together.
Rhino is, sadly, a victim of this crumbling effort.
The film had Paul Giamatti playing a Russian gangster in a mechanical rhino suit, and the
actor clearly relished chewing up as much scenery as he possibly could in the role.
Sadly, he only appears in a couple of scenes.
He might've had more to do in a hypothetical sequel, but here he's largely an example of
a wasted opportunity.
The version of the Green Goblin who shows up in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a perfect
example of the film pushing ahead for universe-building while sacrificing any real sense of long term
storytelling.
We've never met this version of Harry Osborn before, but we're told he's got a connection
to Peter going back years.
We haven't seen the toll his genetic illness is taking on him, but we're told it's bad
and we should care.
We haven't seen any real development in terms of Green Goblin tech, but we're shown it all
packaged and ready for Harry to dive in.
It's a whole lot of telling without any emotional weight.
This lack of real investment makes this the most forgettable version of Green Goblin on
the big screen so far.
Making Electro the primary villain of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a good idea on paper.
He's got a cool powers that can manifest themselves in interesting ways visually, and he was played
by Jamie Foxx, who offered up a new version of the character.
Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work.
Foxx seemed to do the best he could with the material he had, but the character's motivations
get lost in the shuffle of everything else the film is trying to do.
By the time Electro is somehow actually playing music with his powers at the end of the film,
he's lost any goodwill he had before.
"I hate this song."
Venom is a complicated character, and introducing him into any film as a Spider-Man antagonist
has the potential to be very tricky business.
The way Spider-Man 3 does it works fine as a catalyst for the film's climax, but doesn't
really let audiences get to know this particular version of the villain and how he works.
There's no time to dig into what the relationship to the symbiote is, or exactly why Eddie Brock
gives in so quickly, or if there's even any real humanity left in him.
This version of Venom is pretty much just a fight scene, and that's a shame.
Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first solo Spider-Man adventure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
is a great example of a film that knows how to juggle multiple villains without overwhelming
the piece.
While Vulture does the heavy lifting as the film's chief bad guy, his crew back at headquarters
fits into the story in an organic and entertaining way.
However, the Tinkerer doesn't rank higher on this list because he doesn't have that
much to do in the film.
He's the guy in the chair, manipulating tech and communications behind the scenes while
the Vulture does the fighting.
Because of that, he's not a heavy hitter within the film, but he's certainly entertaining
in the space he's given.
Homecoming manages to breathe real life into him by making him a nosy, strange guy who's
just happy to have a gig where he can be a huge tech nerd.
"What'd I tell you about looking at my phone?"
"Oh, sorry, you left it out.
You know I'm a curious person by nature."
The economy of storytelling in Homecoming is so great that the film manages to fit in
not one, but two versions of the Shocker.
In the film, he's an employee of the Vulture who's gifted with gauntlets that emit tremendous
energy when they make contact with someone or something.
It's enough to make the character stand out in his few fight scenes.
The first Shocker relishes the idea that he can have a self-given code name and go around
punching things with his new toys.
"You're up there wearing that goofy thing, lighting up cars, calling yourself 'the Shocker.
I'm the Shocker, I shock people!'
What is this, pro wrestling?"
"Eh, whatever old man."
When the second Shocker gets hold of the gauntlets, things become much more businesslike, and
the deliberate, calculated way in which he tries to pick apart Peter Parker is actually
rather chilling.
Together, they present a portrait of a minor supervillain that adds plenty to the film
while never getting in the way of Vulture's spotlight.
The Amazing Spider-Man wisely started its new Spidey universe by picking a villain who'd
only been hinted at in the Sam Raimi films in the form of a supporting character.
We'd seen Dr. Curt Connors before, but we'd never seen him transformed into a monster
by his own scientific hubris and desperation.
The fact that the character was in the Raimi films created a sense of excitement among
fans who were finally going to get to see the Lizard, while never quite feeling like
the new film was retracing the steps of the old ones.
In The Amazing Spider-Man, Dr. Connors takes on a certain kind of quiet strangeness that
permeates the early scenes.
You get the sense that he's a man who's thought far too much about things he probably shouldn't
be tinkering with.
As his slow transformation begins, the character becomes even stranger, creating a villain
who's both threatening and sympathetic.
The decision to make The Sandman a major villain in Spider-Man 3 is an interesting one, particularly
when you consider all the other things the film is trying to do with Peter Parker's emotional
journey.
The decision to make him the guy who killed Uncle Ben offscreen in the first film complicates
this in ways that neither the film nor the Spider-Man mythos really need.
Despite this, this version of the Sandman works because of the parallels the film draws
between him and Peter.
They're both men with strange powers they didn't ask for, pushed into darkness by circumstances
beyond their control and hoping to atone for their past mistakes.
Thomas Haden Church plays the character with real heart, and his final scene is one of
the most powerful moments in a flawed film.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me.
I just want you to understand."
Spider-Man 3 could have been a film entirely about the rise of a second Green Goblin in
parallel to Peter Parker wrestling with the Venom symbiote, and it would have still been
a jam-packed movie.
As it is, we got a film that attempted to juggle three different villains and cram them
all together into a final fight scene, so Harry Osborn's final journey in the Spider-Man
trilogy gets crammed in, too.
Still, Harry's decision to become the second Green Goblin in an effort to avenge his father,
and then to seek heroic redemption, is a rewarding one.
It doesn't always work, particularly when Harry has to turn on a dime between hero and
villain in various scenes, but the two preceding films add emotional weight to a weaker script.
Willem Dafoe is having so much fun in the role of Green Goblin, years before character
actors would begin competing for supervillain roles left and right, that his sense of instant
joy at being immersed in the comic book world is infectious.
Dafoe has to transform into full supervillain mode almost instantly, and somehow, he brings
it to life flawlessly.
"What do you want?"
"To say what you won't, to do what you can't."
He does so even in spite of the film's shortcomings in its treatment of the character, something
that's particularly obvious in the costume design.
The decision to forgo an expressive face for the character and instead feature a fang-bearing
mask might have made sense in 2002.
Unfortunately, watching the film today, it makes the scenes with Spider-Man and the Goblin
look a bit too much like action figures yelling at each other.
Even in those moments, though, Dafoe's voice carries the performance.
If you didn't watch the intro, this is where the big spoilers happen, so turn back now!
Spider-Man: Far from Home had to follow a lot of different, very tough acts, just one
of which was Michael Keaton's performance as the Vulture.
The decision to make the next villain Mysterio, another newcomer to live-action Spider-Man,
was a welcome one.
Even better, fans seemed to immediately support Jake Gyllenhaal's casting as Mysterio, a guy
who creates illusions to disguise his true intentions.
Gyllenhaal gets a lot of meaty stuff to play with in the film, from the idea that he first
presents himself as a hero from another dimension to the revelation that he's a scorned former
employee of Tony Stark.
The early, more heroic scenes work great, but the turn is where Gyllenhaal really shines.
Once the gloves are off and he's in full supervillain mode, he's having the time of his life, and
so are we.
He doesn't quite rise to the heights of the very best live-action Spider-Man villains,
but he's very close, so much so that even after Far From Home you can't help but feel
hungry for more of him.
With a few notable exceptions, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films are often defined by their
aesthetic and structural devotion to the Marvel Comics book they're based on.
The key to the best of these films is the way in which they know exactly how to deviate,
and when.
With Spider-Man 2, we get the best of both worlds in Doctor Octopus.
He's a guy who looks and moves exactly how we'd expect the comic book version to move,
but he has the added gravitas of a good man corrupted by his own creation.
Alfred Molina is flawless as Dr. Otto Octavius, a scientist who's hoping to change the world
before his brain is infected by the artificial intelligence in his robotic extra arms after
a horrible accident.
Riddled with guilt and grief, Molina plays the disintegration of the character perfectly,
then manages to guide him back to redemption with the same sense of vulnerability and delicate
emotional resonance.
It's a great performance in a great comic book movie.
Sometimes Spider-Man stories are at their very best when they take a very simple, easy-to-follow
metaphor and translate it into the big, bold strokes of a superhero story.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is a story about Peter Parker finding out his girlfriend's dad is
a jerk, and the jerk is played to perfection by Michael Keaton.
There's so much to love about the Vulture in Homecoming, from the look of the character
to the way Keaton plays him as a working class guy who got tired of being pushed around.
There's no nonsense here, but there are tricky emotional turns to make, and Keaton manages
them all by being equal parts charming and terrifying.
The scene in which he has a private moment with Peter in his car is among the best moments
in any Spider-Man film.
"Hey.
I just saved your life.
Now what do you say?"
"Thank you."
Even better, the fact that his character actually has a point about the way regular people are
pushed down in an increasingly strange world only adds to his impact.
It's a brilliant, layered performance that's going to be hard to top.
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