'Amazing Spider-Man' Director Marc Webb Pitches Sequel Villain: 'The Mime'

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After reimagining Spider-Man's mythology with this summer's The Amazing Spider-Man, Marc Webb tells The Hollywood Reporter that he's interested in further departing from canon -- going as far as creating a totally new adversary for the web-slinger.

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“I do think it would be tricky to totally invent a major villain, but if I did that it would be The Mime,” he said Friday in a telephone interview. “My big contribution would be a villain called The Mime. That’s a joke, by the way. A joke.”

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Insisting (again) that he was kidding, Webb says the character’s history is so rich with foes that whoever directs a sequel will have plenty of interesting ones to choose from. “I think you have to be pretty protective of the canon when it comes to villains,” he observes. “And Spider-Man has a great rogues gallery, so there’s a lot to choose from.”

Meanwhile, Webb says he feels like the combination of proven story points and new ideas will allow a sequel to depart from iterations of the hero that audiences saw previously. “I wanted to create a universe that works in and of itself for one movie, but I wanted to create a universe that not only can withstand but anticipate future storylines,” he says.

“Movies like this tend to have sequels, [though] ultimately the audience will tell us if they want one. But I kind of thought it was an interesting thing to anticipate those storylines and think about the backstories and how we can parlay those into an ongoing story.”

Webb also says he derived his approach to the film from the one employed by artists and writers to the comic book itself. “That’s something I love about the comics -- the serialized nature of them,” he says. “And then certain storylines we’ll pick up and characters that we’ll expand upon, but it’s all part of the mythology that we spent a lot of time developing early on.

“I think there’s obligations to canon that were fun to explore, but the future is bright,” he says. “I think there’s a lot of possibility there.”