Even before the likes of Morbius, Kraven the Hunter, and Madame Web were even officially entered into active development, everybody knew that the long-term plan for Sony was to built towards the Sinister Six, and ultimately have them face off against Spider-Man.
That became even more clear when the franchise was rebranded from the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters to Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, and then hammered home further when the post-credits scenes of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and No Way Home offered the first real sense of cross-pollination.
Some of that world-building has been undone by the horrendously clunky post-credits scenes of Morbius, but we all know where this heading in the end. Despite already admitting that Michael Keaton’s Vulture is building a team, director Daniel Espinosa still tried to dance around the Sinister Six line of inquiry during an interview with Variety.
“I think they’re pretty brainy, both of them. Vulture is pure mechanic ingenuity. Morbius is regarded as one of the five big geniuses of the Marvel Universe. As a biologist, there are very few other people that have the same strength, maybe Hank McCoy as Dark Beast. Wasn’t it a Spider-Man comic where Aunt May was sick? And he gathers Reed Richards, Tony Stark, all the geniuses, and in there is Michael Morbius. I think Norman Osborn would be very interesting.
That’s a whole different idea, that’s like if you go away from the idea of Sinister Six and you’re going into something different. There are other possibilities, because it’s been made for so many years. For me, what Kevin Feige made so brilliant was the way they took many of the mythologies and chose different parts of them and the realization that it doesn’t have to start just like the comics started. You don’t have to go from the ’60s and the ’70s and then to the ’80s and ’90s. You can take from the 2000s, which was like Civil War, and mix them with other concepts of characters that are from earlier parts of the comic book universe.”
Based on the overwhelmingly negative reception afforded to Morbius so far, we can only hope that Sony’s upcoming slate of superhero stories do a much better job of laying the groundwork for Sinister Six, even if we don’t know for sure which version of Spider-Man they’ll be going up against.