I feel like at this point everyone is scrambling to get a date for Spider-Man: Homecoming. After all, with Marvel Studios having scored a major victory at bringing Spidey into the MCU and him turning out to be the best thing about Captain America: Civil War, just about everyone is on board to see more Spiderman. And the cast for this movie just keeps on growing and growing, with Tom Holland being joined by Robert Downey Jr, Michael Keaton, Zendaya, Michael Barbieri and Kenneth Choi, just to name a few. As of right now, there aren’t any confirmations on whom the majority of these characters will be playing in the movie, although rumors have suggested that Keaton will be playing the part of Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture. And now, following off the addition of Donald Glover to the cast, Deadline has just announced that Silicon Valley’s Martin Sharr and Prometheus’ Logan Marshall-Green have been cast in the movie as well. Like the majority of this cast, the names of their roles remain a mystery.
I’m sure that Marvel fans will be heading to the forums to discuss who they speculate Sharr and Marshall-Green will be playing, but personally I’m hoping that Marvel goes the MCU route and casts them as traditionally B-list characters/villains. The Sam Raimi Spider-Man films definitely set a standard for comic book movies, using the most popular names in the wallcrawler’s lore to heighten their popularity. This also applied to the villains, and while they didn’t always get the best pacing for development (looking at you Spider-Man 3), there was definitely a memorability that resonated with them in comparison to the more “realistic” Marc Webb films. However, Marvel’s use of lesser known characters to jumpstart the MCU have allowed the company to expand their roster of characters to a wider range of audiences, something DC still struggles to achieve. So where previous Spider-Man films used names that audiences were more likely to recognize, this is Marvel’s big chance to introduce newer characters and villains that only die-hard Spider-Man fan would be able recognize if you pointed them out.
Spiderman: Homecoming is set to be released on July 7, 2017. It will be directed Jon Watts based around a screenplay written by John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein. Even if Tom Holland has given us the best live-action Spider-Man to date, the possibility that this movie manages to top Spiderman 2 remains to be seen.