Nobody predicted yesterday’s news that Jamie Foxx is reprising the role of Electro in the untitled Spider-Man 3. The Oscar-winning actor last played the part in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which underperformed at the box office and paved the way for Spidey to make his triumphant debut in the MCU in Captain America: Civil War.
It’s safe to say this is something of a surprise, then, as everyone had written off the Andrew Garfield Spidey movies as a narrative and commercial dead end. The casting now means, though, that Spider-Man 3 will see representation from both the Sam Raimi trilogy in J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson and the Amazing films. So in a way, it’s almost a live-action Into the Spider-Verse.
What we don’t know right now, however, is whether they’ll acknowledge these connections in the movie. The last time we saw Foxx’s Electro, he was being overloaded with power, eventually appearing to explode in a ball of lightning. That seemed like a fairly conclusive death, though on a rewatch, it seems at least possible that he might have survived in some form.
One theory doing the rounds as to how he’s now in the MCU comes via WandaVision. The Disney+ show will see Scarlet Witch using her reality-bending powers to create a world in which she and Vision (who was killed in Avengers: Infinity War) can live in domestic suburban bliss. Could it be plausible that her screwing with the fabric of time and space would allow an energy-based baddie like Electro to make the leap?
We’ll have to wait and see, but one thing’s for sure: The MCU is about to get very, very complicated.