Robero Orci is just one of what is essentially a staff for Sony’s Spider-Man franchise. Orci, who wrote The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with partner Alex Kurtzman, will assist Kurtzman and Ed Solomon in writing a Venom film, but he’ll also be scripting The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and, at the very least, advising on The Sinister Six and The Amazing Spider-Man 4. It’s a busy gig, and this type of franchise thinking really depends on each entry being a hit, a dicey proposition when they’re all going to be quite expensive. As divided some may be on Orci’s body of work, that’s a tremendous amount of pressure.
Orci recently alleviated that pressure by sitting down with IGN, promoting his new series Matador on the new network El Rey. Discussing the Spidey films, he didn’t drop any main bombshells, but he did reveal some of the connective tissue behind these movies. The biggest one seems to be that these films are basically going to have a hub of activity, and that hub will be Oscorp.
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.
Orci’s further comments emphasize how the Osborns will be central to the story, so expect Chris Cooper and Dane DeHaan menacing the wall-crawler over these multiple films. This also strongly suggests that one of the Goblins will be the leader of a Sinister Six, an angle that Orci compares to the FX series The Shield, which spotlighted crooked cop Vic Mackey:
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.
Orci also confirms that The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 4 are indeed separate movies from the planned Venom and The Sinister Six movies, which makes this already a six-film series, nine if you count the earlier Raimi films. Impressive? Impressive-ish. The way this will be handled is by Orci turning movies into TV. He's apparently assembled a team that will join together for all of the planning meetings. Together, they'll craft the overall vision, share easter eggs and ideas and then they'll break apart to write their separate scripts and make their separate movies.
To read more, including Roberto Orci’s thoughts on a Star Trek/Transformers crossover and a little bit of shade-throwing on Spider-Man 3, read here.
