While Spider-Man: Homecoming is clearly going to focus on our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, the first trailer showed us that Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark would be playing a prominent role as well. Now, we've learned exactly how the character will fit into the overall plot and his connection to the movie's villain. Apparently, the character of Adrian Toomes, played by Michael Keaton, sees a significant downturn in his fortunes and he blames Stark for it. According to co-producer Eric Hauserman Carroll...
Some people see themselves as victims --- he sees himself a little bit like that. He probably would have a strong argument that he never got a fair shot --- a lot of 'Why not me? Where's mine?'
A new story in USA Today contains a lot of detail about exactly who Adrian Toomes is and why he becomes The Vulture. Apparently, Michael Keaton's character will be a guy who runs a salvage company that specializes in doing the clean-up after large-scale disasters, like say the sorts of massive battles that tend to take place during any given Marvel movie. Unfortunately for him, things go south when a new government-run organization comes in to take over those sorts of jobs. This new company happens to have been founded by one Tony Stark. Thus, Toomes feels he has a score to settle with Iron Man.
The plan for revenge involves Adrian Toomes and two of his associates to take alien artifacts and advance tech, likely scavenged from the cleanup sites, and sell them to criminals. We see a gang using what is obviously an out of place device to cut through an ATM. This is very likely how Toomes ends up getting noticed by Spider-Man.
They also, we assume, use some of this technology for themselves in order for Toomes to become the Vulture. His two associates will become the Shocker and the Tinkerer.
If we're being honest, this setup sounds a lot like the sort of thing we got in Ir__on Man 2. The details are different but in that case, we also saw somebody who felt they had been wronged by Stark, and created the technology necessary to get their revenge. Still, while the setup might be the same, this is a Spider-Man movie and not an Iron Man movie and so we figure that it will fall to the wall-crawler to ultimately take down the bad guys.
It also needs to be said, however, that Adrian Toomes may have a valid point in his fight with Tony Stark. It seems a little unfair for Tony Stark to make money off of cleaning up the mess that was created by Iron Man. There's a serious conflict of interest there.
We're certainly excited for Spider-Man: Homecoming this summer. Of course, we still have a Guardians of the Galaxy movie to get through first. You can check out the full marvel schedule here.
