‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ nearly featured Rhino and Mysterio

Prior to Spider-Man: No Way Home, nobody believed that Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spidey villains would ever return to the big screen. After all, not only were their particular strands of the Marvel universe long-dead, but most of the characters died before our eyes.

But we hadn’t reckoned with Marvel’s newfound willingness to engage in multiversal shenanigans. Thanks to Doctor Strange’s spell going awry, Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Sandman, Lizard, and Electro came back to cause havoc. The only frustrating thing for long-time Spidey fans is that this gang is short one member of being a ‘Sinister Six’. Sure, you could count Venom’s cameo right at the end, but as he never joined up with the other villains it’s a stretch.

Now an episode of ‘The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith’ podcast shows that No Way Home writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers considered adding just one more hero to complete the Six.

“Yes, there was [talk of Mysterio or Rhino returns]. Yeah, there was definitely talk, like, ‘Who is the Sinister Six here? If you want six, you can always say Venom was the sixth [member] if you want. He’s in the tag, he made it [into the MCU], but he never made it out of Mexico (laughs). There was always that talk of, ‘Should we be doing officially the Six?'”

Given that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is a part of the story already as he’s responsible for revealing Spidey’s secret identity, I’d have preferred seeing Paul Giamatti stepping back into his Rhino mech to wreak destruction on New York. The main obstacle is that the film’s rules underlined that only people who know Peter Parker is Spider-Man are being dragged across, and I don’t think Giamatti’s Rhino ever learned who was behind the mask.

Whatever the case, it seems silly to complain that there should have been more villains in No Way Home. Before the release, I’d worried that it’d be too over-stuffed, though the script balanced them all out beautifully. Who’s to say that shoving one more in simply to make up the numbers wouldn’t have spoiled that?

Spider-Man: No Way Home is still in theaters.