Long before Spider-Man: No Way Home was given an official title and a multiversal synopsis, one of the many recurring rumors to make the rounds repeatedly claimed that the seeds would be sown for Jacob Batalon’s Ned Leeds to eventually emulate his comic book counterpart by becoming the Hobgoblin.
It was far from the craziest thing we’d ever heard, especially when almost every notable Spidey villain ever created has a direct connection to Peter Parker or his costumed alter-ego, and they don’t get much closer than his longtime best friend and guy in the chair.
While the speculation turned out to be a million miles wide of the mark, No Way Home did reveal Ned’s latent mystical abilities, which could hypothetically come in handy should he decide to indulge in some villainy down the line. However, when asked about it directly by Deadline, the actor artfully dodged around the question like a true Marvel Cinematic Universe veteran.
“From all my years of working for Marvel, I feel like I’ve learned to just not say anything. I can’t really speak on things and then say something that might actually be true and then I ruin something, you know what I mean?”
Theoretically speaking, now that Ned has discovered his magical tendencies and has no idea who his best friend is in the wake of Doctor Strange erasing Peter’s existence from the minds of everyone who knew him, it’s not entirely out of the question that the next Spider-Man trilogy could head down the Hobgoblin route, but that’s both a long way away and a big if.