When the excellent actor, Irfan Khan(The Namesake) signed on to Marc Webb's Spider-Man relaunch, it was as a character named Van Atter. In Spidey-lore, the only Van Atter is Nels Van Atter, a former associate of Norman Osborne who gets tested on and eventually transforms into the monstrous Proto-Goblin. Basically a pre-cursor to the Green Goblin and all the numerous other Goblins who plague Spider-Man on a regular basis. Maybe we need to stop assuming everything in the movie universe is going to play out like the comics, because it doesn't look like the Proto-Goblin will be appearing anywhere, at least not in the way we know him.
Irfan Khan spoke about the project to The Indian Express and this is what came out of it...
While he is looking forward to Spiderman, the 48-year-old confesses, that initially he wasn’t keen on the project. “I didn’t want to be part of this violent American fantasy. But both my sons were excited and kept insisting that I take it up.” But the intricacy and freshness of the script finally won. Even then, Irrfan placed one condition before Webber — he didn’t want to be a masked villain or become another creature.
So no Proto-Goblin, at least not in the way we expect to see him. It's always possible that the creature could appear with someone else playing him rather than Khan, but I highly doubt it.
