Spider-Man 4 Villain Now Guaranteed To Be A Disappointment

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 31 seconds ago

We already knew that Spider-Man: Brand New Day was going to have some colorful villains, including Tombstone and Scorpion. Now, scooper @DanielRPK is reporting that the movie is going to have yet another villain, one who has the ability to control the minds of others.

If this scoop proves true, then the Big Bad will be a disappointing foe because generic mind control powers mean that we’re in for a lazy script that Marvel execs are too afraid to let reach its full potential.

Get Out My Head, Charles!

Why am I so convinced that both the villain and the movie will be a major disappointment? One reason is that mind control powers are most likely going to be the explanation for why heroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk end up fighting. In the world of Marvel comics, this is one of many arbitrary reasons that good guys end up clashing before inevitably teaming up to take on a larger threat.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, however, there is usually more of a reason for heroes to fight each other: in The Avengers, for example, Iron Man and Thor initially clashed over S.H.I.E.L.D.’s handling of Loki, effectively inserting one of Earth’s major authorities into what would normally be an internal Asgardian matter. In Captain America: Civil War, disagreement over the Sokovia Accords splits the Avengers right down the middle, while revelations about the Winter Soldier killing Howard and Maria Stark led to a fight where Iron Man battled both Bucky and Captain America. 

In Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, meanwhile, former hero Scarlet Witch has been transformed into a villain by the trauma of losing Vision and her children. Meanwhile, the fight between the titular characters of Deadpool & Wolverine happened because of the simple fact that Deadpool is insanely annoying and Wolverine is (to put it mildly) very short-tempered.

One (Meaningless) Battle After Another

Some of those plot developments are worse than others (Scarlet Witch’s heel turn was particularly disappointing), but all of them are better than just having a bad guy with telepathic powers force our characters to fight. Such a plot doesn’t actually develop our characters or advance the plot in any meaningful way. So if that’s what the Big Bad does in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it means we’re in for plenty of meaningless fights between good guys that are there for no reason other than the writers running out of ideas.

Speaking of which, the modern MCU has often been characterized as running out of ideas, which is a big reason why Robert Downey Jr. is returning to these movies to play a different character altogether. If the latest Spider-Man movie features a villain with mind control powers, it will feel like a creative copout because those are the same powers that Killgrave (also known as the Purple Man) had in Season 1 of Jessica Jones. Furthermore, that distinctly mature show explored the ramifications of a supervillain with mind control powers in ways that we will never, ever see in a Marvel movie.

In Jessica Jones, this villain uses his powers to frequently assault women and force characters to commit fatal self-harm to each other. He gets a young woman to kill her parents, and he turns Jessica’s neighbor into a drug addict and a spy. The villain also forces Jessica to fight Luke Cage just to see how far she’d go to stop the man she loves.

Back To Formula

Do you think anything that chilling or creative will happen with mind control in Spider-Man: Brand New Day? Of course not: chances are that heroes will briefly be forced to fight before the mind-controlled character snaps out of it, thanks to a passionate speech. Then, the good guys will team up with each other, taking out the supervillain and having a few quippy laughs before the credits roll.

Every superhero fan worth their weight in back issues knows that mind control powers are a cheap crutch used mostly by hack writers to force characters to fight. Jessica Jones used a telepathic villain in genuinely creative ways, but the family-friendly Spider-Man films are never going to be dark enough to do the same thing. Unfortunately, that means we’re in for a generic bad guy and generic fight scenes, and unless Marvel can directly mind-control its own audience, this is shaping up to be the MCU’s first Spider-Man movie that bombs harder than the Green Goblin.