By this point, I’m convinced the official Amazing Spider-Man 2 viral site, The Daily Bugle, exists solely to educate casual Spidey fans on the plethora of villains in the Marvel hero’s arsenal, knowing full well Marc Webb and his team can’t get to all of these dudes – or even a sliver of them – without cranking out at least 50 Spidey sequels.
The latest villain tease by the site is Dr. Miles Warren, who is enrolling students in his controversial biogenetics class at Empire State University in Manhattan. If you picked up a Spider-Man comic back in the day, you might remember that Miles Warren went on to become Jackal after experimenting with dangerous, non-ethical cloning methods. But before going completely evil, Warren fell in love with Gwen Stacy (played by Emma Stone in the current run of films), and went crazy after his beloved died at the hands of the Green Goblin.
There’s a much larger story at play if Sony is insisting that Warren exists in this universe. It was revealed, in time, that a Jackal who died in a Shae Stadium battle was a clone created by Warren. Later, Stacy herself returned in clone form… a fact that drove Peter Parker insane.
But I’m not falling down that rabbit hole of speculation. Not after the Daily Bugle tossed out likeminded references to countless other Spider-Man villains who have no prayer of making it into a future movie… at least not in the immediate future. Do you really believe Puma or Shocker are going to surface in this universe? Webb and Sony may be expanding, with plans of getting to a Sinister Six one day, but you’d just as soon see Kraven the Hunter or the Scorpion in a film before producers stumbled all the way down to the Jackal.
What these stories do is connect tissue to Norman Osborn and the characters that have associations to OsCorp – which Warren did and does. But we can’t get too far off track. The "Clone Wars" saga of the Spider-Man universe might exist somewhere down the line. But for the time being, we have Electro, the Rhino and a Goblin (or two) to contend with in Webb’s existing Spider-Man movies. Let’s pack them up into a blockbuster before we start dreaming too big.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 stars Andrew Garfield, Stone, Dane DeHaan and Chris Cooper. It opens everywhere on May 2. Thrill to the trailer one more time, and dream about Warren’s controversial cloning experiments – and what it might mean for Spidey down the line.
