Roberto Orci dishes on Venom, the Sinister Six, and making the antihero appealing

January 15th 2014, 10:33pm

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

The one thing that has to be heavy on your mind when it comes to THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 is the amount of villains along with the introduction of the Sinister Six. Not only that but Venom is finally getting his moment to go solo– but how should we be feeling about that? Excited is one word though worry is always hanging. I can understand how it might be a great task to bring six villains to the big screen and another that fans hold in high regard.

What’s the solution? How do you work around the problems that have plagued others? During an interview with IGN, producer on THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Roberto Orci gives us a glimpse into where the collective is on the villains of the Marvel universe:

IGN: How do you approach a film like Sinister Six that is so villain-centric. Do you take an approach similar to Marvel’s Thunderbolts, where it’s a group of villains that are now – at least to some degree – “being good”?

Roberto Orci: That’s the discussion we’re having right now; how exactly do you do that, and how do you do it without betraying the audience and making them all mean? Drew Goddard [Cabin in the Woods] is going to be writing that one, so it’s kind of his problem. [Laughs] I’m kidding. We’re all working on each other’s stuff. So we want to be true to it, but there are some antiheroes in this day and age. There’s been examples of that even on TV — Vic Mackey on The Shield, one of the great antiheroes of all time. There are ways to milk that story. Audiences have seen everything. They’ve seen all the good guys who never do anything wrong. Is there a story in seeing the other side? That’s the challenge, and that’s the fun. I’m not sure how we’re going to do that yet.

IGN: It is really interesting, because this is perfect time for an antihero like this in a comic book movie, because audiences are so primed with Walter White, or Tony Soprano, or Vic Mackey…But the big question in terms of Venom is, do you think they’re primed enough for an Eddie Brock? Or does it need to be Flash Thompson -complicated, but more heroic?

Orci: I think they’re ready to have things shaken up. I think we’ve all seen everything. You’ve seen everything. You can probably predict the ending of most things even better than a general audience, but a general audience is still pretty good at it. They can see it all coming. So we have to shake it up. You can’t just keep telling the same stories every day.

IGN: When we’re looking at the trailers for something like Spider-Man 2, there’s certainly a lot of villains. It looks like Oscorp may be the central fulcrum that all of these villains are spinning out from. Is that a technique you guys are using to unify this world and make it more cohesive?

Orci: Yeah. Oscorp plays an important part in how our villains get created, obviously, in the first one. So because Peter becoming Spider-Man came out of that, rather than saying, “And then this alien came from space,” or whatever, they’re doing human-hybrid, weird stuff at Oscorp. That’s where Gwen Stacy works anyway as well. So the idea of it representing the good and the bad of science, that it can do great things, but it can also mess you up and do weird things and transform people — as all science can be used for good or bad. So it’s nice to have that organizing principal, but it wasn’t like, “We must keep it at Oscorp.” It flowed naturally from the story development.

While this all does sound slightly reassuring, we won’t know if everything is copasetic until the events unfold on the big screen. Until then– and I’ll put it as a friend did a few days ago– consider me “cautiously optimistic”.

Source: IGN