How does one go about making a movie about a team full of super-villains? That's the problem faced by Sony and a creative think tank led by producers Bob Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Ed Solomon and Drew Goddard as they expand the Spider-Man universe with Venom and Sinister Six spinoffs. The announcement was revealed last month with the suggestion that The Amazing Spider-Man 4's focus would shift to the villains rather than on Peter Parker.
Bob Orci spoke to IGN about their future plans, and he spoke to whether the Sinister Six would be straight up bad guys or if they'll veer closer to anti-hero territory....
"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 [The 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."
Kurtzman is directing the Venom film, with Orci and Solomon joining him on the script. Venom's story has been told before, most recently in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3, but Orci seems to be planning something a little different...
"I think they're ready to have things shaken up. I think we've all seen everything. You've seen everything. You can probably predict the ending of most things even better than a general audience, but a general audience is still pretty good at it. They can see it all coming. So we have to shake it up. You can't just keep telling the same stories every day."
He also says that Oscorp, which had a hand in Spider-Man gaining his powers, will continue to be a factor, especially in the creation of his enemies...
"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."
And lastly, Orci says that we can expect The Amazing Spider-Man 4 to center on Spider-Man, or at least that's the intention. We'll begin to see the master plan unfold on May 2nd 2014 when The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opens, and here are a few pics to whet your appetite. [TotalFilm]
