2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn’t generally regarded as the best movie about Marvel’s preeminent wall-crawler, and in fact its most significant contribution to the world of superhero movies is probably just the fact that it was such a critical and commercial disappointment that it convinced Sony to let Marvel have a shot at making Spider-Man movies—opening the door for Spidey to appear in Captain America: Civil War and then Homecoming and Far From Home. Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn’t offensively terrible or anything, it’s just more of a historical footnote at this point.
Or at least it was, right up until this afternoon, when The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Jamie Foxx’s Electro—one of several major comic villains to show up in Amazing Spider-Man 2—will appear in the next Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland. For people who are reading this but also somehow don’t know how comic book movies work: The current Tom Holland Spider-movies take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while the Garfield and Maguire movies took place in their own separate universes, which means Jamie Foxx’s Electro shouldn’t exist in the world of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. That makes this news very strange.
It’s possible Sony simply wants to bring back Foxx, much like how J.K. Simmons returned as J. Jonah Jameson at the end of Far From Home, but Simmons’ Jameson is a fan-favorite character who everyone was excited to see again. Foxx’s Electro is just… a reminder that Amazing Spider-Man 2 happened. The other possibility is that someone is up to some multiverse madness and this is the same Electro that Jamie Foxx played in the other movie. Maybe Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man will have to show up and help Tom Holland’s Spider-Man? Maybe there could also be, like, a Nic Cage Spider-Man and a pig Spider-Man, and they all go into some kind of Spider-Verse? Now that sounds like a hell of a movie.