Well, it was only a matter of time before we found out, though I didn’t expect it to happen quite so fast. When it was announced at the beginning of the week that Rhys Ifans had been offered the role of the villain of Sony’s upcoming Spider-Man reboot, no one knew which villain he would be playing. Now, thanks to the folks over at The Wrap, we know that Spider-Man will be facing off against the Lizard!
For the uninitiated, the Lizard is actually biologist Dr. Curt Connor, whose attempt to make a serum replicating a lizard’s ability to regrow its tail in order to regrow a severed arm results in him changing into a six-foot tall half-man, half-lizard with a penchant for picking fights with a certain wall-crawler.
There’s no word yet as to how close the screenplay will follow the comics origin or if they’ll try and tie it in with Peter Parker’s own transformation into Spider-Man by having both a lizard and a spider get doses of radiation but Peter’s mutation doesn’t turn out as bad as Connor’s. Sure it sounds like a crappy idea, but this is Sony we’re talking about. Remember, they’re the ones who forced Raimi to include Venom in his third Spider-Man film, a move which unbalanced the film to a harmful degree.
In the midst of this news, though, I have to feel a bit sorry for Dylan Baker, who had played Dr. Curt Connors in two of Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man films. Although his character never underwent the transformation into the Lizard, it was obvious that Raimi was establishing the character to be used in a later sequel in a larger capacity.
